High Definition on my 360!

Got a HD VGA cable for my Xbox 360 and a KVM switch to switch between the two. I cant believe how much of a difference using my 19 inch LCD panel has made. There was so much detail going un-noticed while I was playing on the T.V.

Its fricken amazing. 1280x1024 resolution running Gears of War/COD3 is just like.... Holy $*!@ thats pretty. Man all that time I wasnt really that impressed with my $600 console, now HD has made it all worth it - 15 times over.

now imagine running it on 42 inch LCD instead of 19 inch and you get the idea how much I am enoying my xbox360! PS3 can hang it self

Now imagine running it on a 6 foot wide projected screen and you can imagine how much I'm enjoying my 360 & PGR3!

Now imagine it not having dumb contrived games that in 5 years will look as bad to you as they play... And you should be shooting yourself in the foot.

Now imagine using a PC for years, and not being too impressed with the whole "HD" hype.
I generally dislike shaders (1 exception - water), so the future doesn't seem like its for me.

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PC gaming is dead, it just hasn't fallen down yet.

As long as consoles aren't fully open to develop for i don't see this happening. PC gaming is a much smaller market but it's also big enough to still make a lot of money. Secondly things could improve with DirectX10 and Vista due to the requirements and the xbox360 connection.

I'm was going to say something, but sod it, I'm off to KFC, anyone want anything? :)

Dabz

I really hope the PC gaming market fails miserably and dies.
This can only mean one thing, the big publishers leave the scene and we're (the indie developers) the only ones capable of making entertainment for the millions of PC's around the world. As it should be.

shaders are great, its the way they are currently integrated into art pipelines that isn't. Most of the time they require more coding skill than your average artist has. And often your stuck with a few shaders someone else wrote for you that you can tweak slightly.

If shaders were as straightforward in games as they are in 3dsmax to create, even if you can't really do a lot of special FX shaders you can despribe most surfaces bumpy, shiny, mask multitextured materials and transitions with ease.

SHaders are brilliant just the tools havent matured enough yet.

PC gaming is still huge overall and I expect the PC will overtake the current generation of consoles pretty quickly graphics wise.

Already happened as a 8800gtx/gts already outperforms each consoles gfx power by far.

Now imagine playing pong

Yeah but it will be a while before games themselves make use of that kind of power. Seems to me that the geforce 6 is pretty much what most developers are targeting for the average game these days.

We're All DEVO! 8O)

Yep 360 in High Def is NICE!

> Seems to me that the geforce 6 is pretty much what most developers are targeting for the average game these days.

But there is already at least one game that will not run on the thing, at least not without feeling sluggish. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, I originally ran it on a 6600 and it was slow, even with the graphics turned way down, when I got a 7900 it played great.

GRAW played perfectly on my 6600GTX without turning much off. I didn't like it, but it played fine.

systems are once again cpu limited any way... You can't push the 8800gtx fast and hard enough to tax it out with anything on the market. Think I saw that on toms or anand... can't remember.


And as for the HD... I've always said that the people who aren't impressed with HD, have never SEEN HD. 1080i/p vs 480i is amazing.

yeah. Not like every monitor on the planet can't do the same. HD is an excuse to charge multi-thounds for technology that shouldn't cost any more than a regular TV.

There's not too many monitors that do 1920 X 1080. Aside from that my 1080i HDTV cost less than a PS3 and I don't mean one purchased from eBay either ;)

yeah... because everyone has a 42-70" monitor hanging around the house... and paid the same for it as a 19" regular tv. Sheesh.

didn't say a regular 19 inch TV. A 42 inch HD shouldn't cost any more than a comparable total area regular TV.... now.. you can't say a 42 inch regular tv, nor one which could house a 42 inch reguar tv box.

also.

traditional monitors aren't widescreen. so it translates into a screen that can do 1280 by 1024. Which is like every screen on the market. Even the cheap ass ones like the one I got.

Isn't rare to see ones that can do far greater than HD... like 2048 by 1536... ok.. maybe that is a bit more rare. hahaha seeing as it is as high as XP can go.


lets put it this way. I'm running in 1920 by 1080 right now on a 10 year old $100 when I bought it CRT monitor. and it'll go higher.

actually.. saying it is a $100 crt is a lie... it came with my $450 500 megahertz win 98 PC.

Man, I was in an electronics store looking at the HD TV's and they were showing the difference between HD and normal, but I didn't see a single difference. At all.
The best picture I've ever seen on a TV was on my old Sony from the 80's or something. It beat any new TV that would come out, strangely enough, until it stopped turning on anyways.

Same here. I won't say the same applies to games consoles because I don't think I've seen the XBox360 on an HDTV. I might have but I really didn't stop to ask if the TV I was playing COD2 on was HD or not. But absolutely agreed on actual TV on TV.

I think there's more than one lie there.



Did you stop to find out where their HD feed was from? 90% of all shops showing HD are showing upscaled DVDs... Which means it's still 480(p) being stretched to fit the screen. Another stupid thing they do is show HBO or Showtime HD... which again is merely upscaled shows in most cases. They both have some decent cameras for their sports shows though.

Believe me. Once you see true high def there's a world of difference. Now, not only do I see the difference, but I can also tell the difference in quality of the high def cameras someone is using. A good high def camera vs a cheap one can also mean a world of difference.

I swear, people who can't see the difference in HD must be blind. It's night and day. Make sure the demo was using HD content.

Can't be sure. You'd think that shops trying to show the difference would have an HD feed and it is certainly showing an HD channel, but I guess it's possible they're making themselves look bad.

If you see a proper HDTV demo they put 2 LCD screens next to one another and play back on both.

Basicly the difference between the two is like playing your favourite PC games at 640x480 with antialias on, and 1024x768 with AA on, it's as simple as that. If you can't tell the difference you need your eyes checked.

With video its a bit hit and miss since the first blueray disks used a lousy codec that had quite a few artifacts still and films like the fifth element had better quality video and sound on regular DVD since the jpg like artifacts were barely visible.

Well maybe the UK broadcasts a lower quality HD signal than the US then. It's a well known fact that Sky Digital has hundreds of channels and not enough bandwidth to go around. The quality of some of them is quite appalling, that's standard def.

I will agree. True HighDef TV signals are amazing. I'm just moaning about the TVs costing so much. Not even the flat-panel ones. More so the CRT ones.

No lies about the 1920 by 1080 running on this (ok not really 10 year old, more like 8 year old) monitor. which was free with my PC.

K... My idea to take a digital photo didn't work.

Anyway.. It is running in 1080i course.. the screen isn't widescreen, so its all scrunched up . I can see individual pixels black on white. and even kind of make out a rainbow, it is just soooo small. And the square I drew looked like a rectangle.

Now. I have a screenshot to prove it. It is a low quality gif I did with MS paint. A straight screenie. It'll at least prove I was running in it... well.. unless you think I did it blindly.. But I can't help it if you just don't want to believe the obvious.

www.dampes8n.com/hd.gif

Incase anyone was wondering. Highest this will go is 1920 by 1200 ... If I go to 1920 by 1440 it won't display.

It is at 1920 by 1200 now and the picture is very nice. Course. The type is like 1 point. But it is readable. I have black bands on the edges of the screen, so I bet I can strech it out to fill... but I don't want to screw with that....

EDIT

Checked with my dad... the one who bought the PC.. He got it on a good deal for $450. it was going for 700-750 without the rebates and other deals he got. Still.. The monitor was free with the PC. Came with a junky printer too. And a set of polkaudio speakers, no sub. just left and right.

Why would you run a 4:3 Monitor at a Widescreen resolution?

You wouldn't... I normally run at 1024. I was just saying I could. To prove that HD CRTs shouldn't cost so much. If a cheap-o monitor for the pre-HD era could cram that many pixels on the screen, there is no reason making the screen wider should warrent a 10,000% increase in price.

Prices came down, but I still would expect to pay over 400 for a 25 inch HD CRT TV. Easily twice what it is really worth...

And the LCD Plasma and DLP TVs cost too much too, though, I'm giving them slack cause it is newish tech. At least as far as TVs go.

Haha good point. It's just the vendors cashing in on the hype generated by the whole HD era.

UK tv broadcasts are ridculas. Some channels are broadcasting 320x240 and i've heard of lower... Uk are always behind man...

320x240 hahaha, thats what, original vga graphics.

It is worse than hype. People actually feel like these things are worth the multi-thousands they paid for it. They could have HD tvs in every home by now if they were fairly priced. I didn't even mind them being so much when they first came out. But it's been forever already.

What they should have done is made them dirt cheap, specially the flat-panel LCDs and such. Make a 42 inch for something like $300 and have 20 inchers for something like $100 and then give them other cool options. Wifi or bluetooth into your home pc or media center and display a photoalbum or art gallery, where it changes the picture every 5-10 min. People would hang them on the walls like art.

People like Sony should have figured this out. Get the HD tvs into everyones houses and you can make a killing off things to add onto them. Like PS3s and blu-ray players and packages of high-def art photos on mem-cards.

But no. Lets make them prohibitively expensive so 5 years out of the gate less than 1% of the population of the world's richest nation has one, and the rest are starting to realize they don't need one.

There's more to it than just pixel resolution. There's the quality of the image, HDMI inputs, inbuilt digital tuners etc.

I do agree they're currently too expensive, but prices will inevitably fall. Small LCD monitors have already gone down - just larger panels, including TVs, next.

its partly the yields they get on the large LCD's and fabrication. Probably need to be expensive to cover some of the costs of faults.

I've seen reasonable 32" HDTV's for under $700 which isn't terrible.

yes it is.. I won't pay more than $400 for a 32 inch HDTV regardless of style (crt lvd dlp...)

not worth it, considering how much content for it costs.

Obviously enough people are paying those high prices that they feel it's worth it to keep them that high.

Doesn't mean it is intelligent of them. Selling a product that kills your customers is a bad idea, didn't stop the cig companies from being very successful with it.

Success is not a good indicator of how much potential other methods might be.

For example. Vtech is successful with making all the Vsmile games themselves. Regardless of the fact that they could make a lot more money if they also sold devkits.

Again. The music industry could switch gears entirely and embrace an online selling plan that uses already stored content to automaticly promote popular songs and songs that a person might like. Effectivly eliminating marketing costs, enabling them to sell for less, which in turn lets them sell even more. Making far more profit.

In other words. Free to listen internet radio, where you just click the playing song and add to some kind of cart. Downloads in order and subtracts from a pre-paid amount. Say. 5-10 cents a song, could be even less. The radio is built off the database of songs and plays things 'like' what you already bought. No longer is it important that a band sells millions and millions, because the shared cost of hosting the files is small, and the recording costs are already tiny.

You would sell more, the music would be better, there is no marketing cost (outside of the cost to market the outlet, which could be solved if the RIAA ran the store) and everyone wins.

Bringing the albums to the stores is trivial too, all the stores could tap into the site with a store-account and play a store radio in the store, and also have terminals that let people try any album they want before they buy (off a list of what is in the store, of course, and it is up to the store owner to keep the inventory up to date on his store site).
(and you could still sell the albums for 10-15 a pop in the store because you get the full package. Only now you make a profit on all of them, not minus the marketing costs)

SO yeah. Obviously enough people suffer through buying the albums for 15-20$ a pop for the music industry to make money.

It would be CRAZY for them to impliment something relatively cheap which stands no chance of ruining their current infrastructure while they test the new system, with an obvious track to follow towards switching gears with little risk. That couldn't possibly be more successful.

What does that tell you? Sure almost all of us in these
forums can tell the difference between HD and 480, but the
average person can't.

(My job is tech support for Comcast cable users, so I have
many cases to back this claim up)

I myself have seen true HD, and it does look great. But I
won't pay the prices they're asking for it. It's just not
that much better.

What I'm saying is: Sure HD is great, but it's not great
enough for people to make such a big stink over it. Everytime
people say things like "It's like a whole new experience!" I cringe.

"No it's not."

Its fun to see just how imperfect the hollywood stars' skin is though :)
I've got a 37" LCD TV with 1366x768 resolution, but DVD's work just fine for me. I get somewhat distracted when the picture is clearer though.

I run most game in this resolution, with tons of antialias, and frankly I prefer it over super-resolutions.

Mate, just no! They do use seriously low bit rates on some channels *cough* British *cough* Eurosport *cough* but the resolution never drops below PAL's 625 lines.

As for the whole HD debate, true HD video does look impressive because we've never seen real images at that resolution before. Polygonal game graphics don't impress me one little bit since I've been playing games at roughly that resolution since about the year 2000 on PCs anyway.