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[Gaiff]

So, I recently made a thread about a youtuber who has OC'd his PS3 for better frame rate and found an interesting post:

PS3 and 360 would have been much better consoles from a technical standpoint if we went with CRT TVs at SD resolution. I played the 3 Uncharted games on a CRT and they looked beautiful. If they were to target 480p, 60fps would have been the standard for that generation.

In fact I think we should have stayed one generation behind in terms of TV resolution: 720p (with native 720p monitors) for PS4 and 1080p for PS5, but with all the other features, like HDR, Oled, 120hz etc. that are available today.

At least for the PS5 generation the use of reconstruction technology is helping the consoles to make a reasonable use of 4K displays.

And I wholeheartedly agree with this. Display manufacturers are some of the biggest pathological liars in the tech world who will advertise muddy jargon to sucker people into buying subpar products. For instance, they advertise(d) 60Hz TVs as 120Hz when it's false. They're 60Hz TVs with motion interpolation. Another scam is HDR. Since there is no standard, you find all kinds of tags such as: HDR10, HDR1000, HDR10+, HDR400 (which isn't even HDR), etc.

Never in my opinion has this hurt gaming more than in the PS360 era aka the era of the HD resolution. It was back then that a major push was made to sell LCD TVs with high-definition capabilities. Most at the time were 720p TVs but the average consumer didn't know the difference. It was HD and you on top, you had interlaced vs progressive scan, making things even more confusing. Back then, an HDMI cable was extremely expensive ($50+ for a 6ft one) but you HAD to have an HDTV, otherwise, you were missing out on the full potential of your gaming console. While it was cool to watch your football games on an HD TV (and let's be honest, most networks were slow as hell to deliver HD content with some taking years), the gaming experience was quite different.

What most people gaming on consoles (and I was one of them) didn't really talk about was how abysmal the performance was compared to the previous generation which had far more 60fps games than their newer, more powerful successors. It wasn't just 60fps, it was also the stability of 30fps games. We were sent back to the early 64-bit era performance-wise with many (dare I say most?) games running at sub 30fps and sub HD resolutions. Furthermore, the early HDTVs in fact looked much worse than the CRTs we had and I remember being thoroughly unimpressed with my spanking brand new 720p Sharp Aquos television compared to my trusty old Panasonic CRT. The same happened when I got my Samsung KS8000 4K TV, it was a step down from the Panasonic plasma I had before, and 4K while sharp and crisp wasn't worth tanking my fps. 1440p was just fine and the 980 Ti I had at the time simply wasn't enough to drive this many pixels.

It was easy to sell big numbers: 1080>720>480. More pixels = better and clearer image which was a load of horseshit because pixel count doesn't matter nearly as much for CRT TVs. Never mind the loss of perfect blacks and high contrast that the CRT TVs provided by default. Plasma were also quite a bit better than LCDs but suffered from burn-ins and high power consumption and were hot.

In my opinion, the PS360 consoles should have stuck to SD resolutions and CRT devices but aim for higher frame rates. 60fps at SD resolutions should have been doable. I played inFamous at a friend's home on a CRT and it looks great. Imagine if it was also running at 60fps. I've also been dusting up my old 360 and PS3 only to realize that most games I play run like shit compared to the standards of today.

Then PS4/X1 could have moved to 720p/60fps or 1080p/60fps for less demanding games (assuming a less shit CPU). 30fps would of course always be on the table. Current consoles could have been 1080p/60/ray tracing devices with graphics comparable or even exceeding 4K/30 modes and then PS6 would be the proper move to 4K which in my opinion without upscaling is a waste of GPU power.

Thoughts on the HD revolution and how it impacted gaming? Would you change anything? Were you happy with the results?

 

[EverydayBeast]

I’m so happy gaming went HD, smart people figured out how to bounce super graphics off your screen also the frame ratez.

 

[Deerock71]

So...Nintendo's been right all along?

 

[Trumpets]

What is this, Bad-Take Sunday??? The move to HD was an ENORMOUS visual upgrade over previous generations. There's been nothing like it since.

 

[Antwix]

I disagree. When I finally upgraded to a 360 after my PS2 and loaded up Halo 3 for the first time on a plasma tv.... it looked like 8K to me. Super crisp , clean and vibrant.

 

[Captain Toad]

Just look at Wii games versus 360 games. You're wrong OP.

The leap to HD was the last huge upgrade we got between generations. We had them every generation prior and it's been diminishing returns ever since.

 

[LordOfChaos]

Eh, SD to HD was a big leap. But I'd tend to agree that consoles pursued 4K too quickly when we're far from saturating what 1080p visuals can look like, we're still pretty far from photorealism.

It's why I think 1440p + FSR is a pretty good target for this generation rather than squandering GPU power on pure 4K

 

[NightmareFarm]

I kind of agree, wasn't worth the trade off for 30fps and now we're playing catchup this gen with the same graphics as last gen but trying to bring back 60fps.

Even if we didn't jump to HD, 7th gen would still be an extremely big generational leap anyway.

 

[SumJester]

The real scam in that gen was pure digital.
Losing ownership one console at the time

 

[Gamer79]

Eh, SD to HD was a big leap. But I'd tend to agree that consoles pursued 4K too quickly when we're far from saturating what 1080p visuals can look like, we're still pretty far from photorealism.

It's why I think 1440p + FSR is a pretty good target for this generation rather than squandering GPU power on pure 4K

agreed. The dropoff from 4k to 1440p at a standard viewing difference is almost nill.

 

[MisterXDTV]

PS3/360 were targeting just 720p anyway. The biggest switch was from 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 that meant much higher horizontal resolution

I think it was the right call to make in 2006. You don't start a new gen with obsolete tech.... PAL/NTSC wasn't enough anymore

A gen that would have lasted until 2014 had to be HD (Ready)

 

[nial]

PS2 and PS3 games never looked that different to me.

 

[Valkyria]

Yeah no. CRT meant 50 Hz on Pal territories. The move to 720p was the right call.

 

[RIPN2022]

PS3/360 were targeting just 720p anyway. The biggest switch was from 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 that meant much higher horizontal resolution

I think it was the right call to make in 2006. You don't start a new gen with obsolete tech.... PAL/NTSC wasn't enough anymore

A gen that would have lasted until 2014 had to be HD (Ready)

Wii launched in 2006 with obsolete tech, although not sure what people make of that in the grand scheme of things.

 

[hyperbertha]

Yeah no. CRT meant 50 Hz on Pal territories. The move to 720p was the right call.

30 fps > 50hz?

 

[March Climber]

Eh, SD to HD was a big leap. But I'd tend to agree that consoles pursued 4K too quickly when we're far from saturating what 1080p visuals can look like, we're still pretty far from photorealism.

It's why I think 1440p + FSR is a pretty good target for this generation rather than squandering GPU power on pure 4K

Agreed. Native 4k set us back in terms of graphics and framerate and devs are doing their best to keep up and use visual trickery to make sure each game looks good on 4k screens. However, a lot of general audiences don't care and just want more and more, not knowing that video games can't work like film cameras. It should have been more gradual with 1440p then maybe 4k later on.

It's all going to be even more of a mess if 8k becomes less niche and more commonplace.

 

[Celcius]

I disagree OP, high definition was so clear and a big upgrade at the time

 

[Gaiff]

Just look at Wii games versus 360 games. You're wrong OP.

Did you read the OP? The 360 games looking better than Wii games isn't due to resolution alone. Uncharted 3 at 480p still looks better than any Wii game. I played it on a CRT and it still looks like a proper PS3 game.

The leap to HD was the last huge upgrade we got between generations. We had them every generation prior and it's been diminishing returns ever since.

And that leap came with a massive drop in performance. Our pixels are clearer but the frame rate got chopped in half. Furthermore, CRT TVs were plain better than LCDs even factoring the resolution. The contrast ratio of CRTs wasn't replicated until OLED TVs became a thing.

I disagree. When I finally upgraded to a 360 after my PS2 and loaded up Halo 3 for the first time on a plasma tv.... it looked like 8K to me. Super crisp , clean and vibrant.

In no small part due to it being a plasma TV which I highlighted in the OP. Plasma was a lot better than LCD at the time.

 

[jufonuk]

So Nintendo wins again?

This is clearly a sarcastic joking answer.
Tbh I found the jump to 1080P great and then a few years later 4K arrives but there isn’t enough 4K tv signals to justify. Then it’s going up to 8K

I think 2K 60fps should be the main standard for a few years console wise so we can get rock solid games from that.

 

[Gaiff]

Yeah no. CRT meant 50 Hz on Pal territories. The move to 720p was the right call.

20-30fps is better than 50fps?

I disagree OP, high definition was so clear and a big upgrade at the time

Was it worth games running the way they did? Looking back at the PS360 games, the performance was brutal for many games.

 

[Celcius]

20-30fps is better than 50fps?

Was it worth games running the way they did? Looking back at the PS360 games, the performance was brutal for many games.

Not all games had horrible frame rates. I had lots of fun that gen and still have my ps3 to this day.

 

[MAX PAYMENT]

1080p is low res at this point. I like having higher resolution options.

 

[Gaiff]

Not all games had horrible frame rates. I had lots of fun that gen and still have my ps3 to this day.

I did too and lived in blissful ignorance to be honest, and perhaps this was for the better.

Not all games had horrible frame rates as you say but it was overall quite a step back from the previous generation. You'd be shocked at how many games run at 60fps on the PS2. They were an extreme rarity on PS3.

To me, the way a game feels is a lot more important than the way a game looks which is why I will prioritize frame rate over resolution almost every time. Doubly so when the upgrade in resolution comes with the caveat of moving to shitty LCD tech.

 

[Gaiff]

What is this, Bad-Take Sunday??? The move to HD was an ENORMOUS visual upgrade over previous generations. There's been nothing like it since.

And came with an enormous performance downgrade.

 

[lostinblue]

They would have never made consoles as powerful as Xbox 360 and PS3 if they weren't targeting HD (256 MB instead of 512 MB would have been a given, if not worse). And if they didn't I can bet the market would have evolved slower. Meaning PS4 and Xbox One would probably be less powerful when they shipped, being "first generation HD consoles" instead of second generation. Multiplat games of that era that came on PC would also have aged worse.

X360 and PS3 would also not have lasted as long as they did in the market, (so PS4 and Xbox One would be released sooner) as pressure for HD consoles would be huge from the minute you have HD TV sets but no consoles that output that.

As pointed out, plenty of stuff on X360 and PS3 actually holds out surprisingly well to this day while still being HD, sure framerate, texture resolution and overall image quality is not stellar, but that was the cost of having those graphics in 2006. I find it impressive, that some of those games actually ran on them as they did and the tradeoff was worthwhile in order to be in the forefront of things. I commend them for getting so much right in HD with so little juice and for going for it the minute it became feasible instead of waiting it out.

That said, 480p modes should have always wielded more performance and I think I remember that at least in some cases they did. Not a good trade-off unless you're playing in a CRT though, just look at how Wii games have aged.

And came with an enormous performance downgrade.

That's up for debate. It's not like framerates on PS2/GC/XBox were stellar. Sure you could target 60 fps, there were 60 fps games, but most games were 30 fps and plenty had dips. Remember with PS2 you didn't have loading on the fly hardware support so loadings/pop-in within a big level often made the games stutter.

I felt X360 was at least comparable with last gen in regards to that performance metric. PS3 had a harder time with multiplat games, of course. A bit between N64 and PS2 in regards to framerate.

 

[64bitmodels]

why do you think that 3rd gen to 4th gen to 5th gen were the biggest jumps when it came to gaming in not just visuals but gameplay possibilities as well?

they were all 240p consoles. we stuck with the same resolution for 15 years and look at the gains we got. NES games and PS1 games are basically 2 entirely different mediums with how fucking drastic they are. imagine how much better PS5 games would look as a whole if it targeted 1440p instead of 4k.

Resolution is the biggest factor that halts gaming performance. Would we have ever gotten 3d gaming if the N64 output at 480p and made that the standard for all future games?

 

[Celcius]

I did too and lived in blissful ignorance to be honest, and perhaps this was for the better.

Not all games had horrible frame rates as you say but it was overall quite a step back from the previous generation. You'd be shocked at how many games run at 60fps on the PS2. They were an extreme rarity on PS3.

To me, the way a game feels is a lot more important than the way a game looks which is why I will prioritize frame rate over resolution almost every time. Doubly so when the upgrade in resolution comes with the caveat of moving to shitty LCD tech.

Ah I see. I'm the type of gamer that would rather have 30 fps with all the bells and whistles than 60 or 120 fps

 

[marjo]

What hurt games more IMO was the absolutely awful internal scalars in most TVs and monitors. It meant that unless outputting at the display's natives res, games would look like shit. Thankfully, we're at at the stage now where games can be rendered internally at a lower resolution and rely on upscaling/reconstruction to output at whatever res works best with the display, which is a much better position to be in.

 

[Bojji]

30 fps > 50hz?

Pal released were fucked most of the time (one way or the other) plus majority of PS2 games were 30 fps so that means juddering on 50hz displays (or 25 fps caps lol).

Move to HD standards was very much needed (in Europe at least).

I had modded PS2 with RGB cable and mostly played NTSC games in 60hz (RGB cable enabled colors on pal tvs), but legal customers didn't have options like that.

 

[lmimmfn]

I remember this, seeing DMC 4 with awful framerate and resolution on the PS360 while I was getting over 100FPS on PC at 1080p.

Just saying!

 

[SportsFan581]

PS360 Games sure would not have aged well.

You target the displays people have.

I had my 360 connected to CRT for most of its life, it was quite rough towards the end. Devs got a bit too comfortable with tiny text.

 

[Sleepwalker]

The year is 2013 and I'm playing through last of us 1 at 480p PS3 on my shiny new tv and it looks like ass - me from OPs timeline.


Horrible scenario

 

[Majima Everywhere System]

If consoles werent attempting modern display specs, there would be no console market today. PC is kept at bay by decent performing machines. Even the switch/steam deck fight will be the same.

 

[Knightime_X]

You were kinda forced into HD tvs starting with PS3 and Xbox 360.
Text was micro and completely unreadable.
I'm sure most people didn't realize that until after they purchased the console.
I wished they allowed an increase in text size because 720p ps360 games downsampled to 480p\i monitors looked amazing.

 

[Gaiff]

Ah I see. I'm the type of gamer that would rather have 30 fps with all the bells and whistles than 60 or 120 fps

Which is fine and awesome that we now get to choose. This should have been the case ages ago but nobody except for nerds knew what resolution and frame rate were back in 2005.

The year is 2013 and I'm playing through last of us 1 at 480p PS3 on my shiny new tv and it looks like ass - me from OPs timeline.


Horrible scenario

Or keep your CRT that has a better image than your LCD anyway. LCDs up until recently were garbage.

 

[intbal]

When the 360 was first conceptualized, I believe they actually intended for it to spend most of its life playing on a CRT.
That's why the daughter die is optimized for 640x480 with 4xMSAA.
At the time (which would have been about 2001 when the OG Xbox was released), Microsoft wasn't counting on the TV manufacturers pushing so fast to transition to LCD and higher resolutions. Of course, it worked out well enough since they were able to incorporate the tiling to enable higher resolutions.

 

[lmimmfn]

You were kinda forced into HD tvs starting with PS3 and Xbox 360.

Text was micro and completely unreadable.

I'm sure most people didn't realize that until after they purchased the consolNot

Not when playing on a 105" projector screen

 

[Valkyria]

30 fps > 50hz?

Yes, because if you had ever used a PAL system (or maths) you would have known that It would have been 25 FPS. Without taking into account that HD standard it's 16:9 by default and not 4:3.

 

[bentanchorbolt]

The biggest problem was how shitty LCD televisions were at the time. I was living in South Korea when the 369 came out and I paired it to a 720p Sony LCD. Light grays instead of blacks, noisy image, smeary as shit, and a ton of input lag.

Luckily I was only there for a year and was able to hook back up with the 34” Sony crt I had before leaving for Korea. Everything about that tv was better.

 

[Spukc]

Going from a wii on a crt to a ps3 on a flat HD screen at 720p playing motorstorm was fucking huuuge i remember getting chills watching casino royale in HD.

OP IS INSANE

 

[Gaiff]

The biggest problem was how shitty LCD televisions were at the time. I was living in South Korea when the 369 came out and I paired it to a 720p Sony LCD. Light grays instead of blacks, noisy image, smeary as shit, and a ton of input lag.

Luckily I was only there for a year and was able to hook back up with the 34” Sony crt I had before leaving for Korea. Everything about that tv was better.

This. LCDs were shit back then. The benefits were that they were lighter and much larger but that came at the expense of an awful contrast ratio and worse image overall.

I've consistently been underwhelmed by LCD displays and am kind of pissed that back then, console manufacturers paired with TV manufacturers to sell us their subpar TVs.

Going from a wii on a crt to a ps3 on a flat HD screen at 720p playing motorstorm was fucking huuuge i remember getting chills watching casino royale in HD.

OP IS INSANE

LCDs back then were crap. If you had a plasma, that's a different story.

 

[Art The Clown]

I don’t know man. When I got my first 720p set in 2007 and played Gears of War for the first time on that set compared to a Zenith set, I was blown away. It was night and day.


Speaking of that 720p tv, it was a Panasonic set I got from Boscovs. It was 32 inch and cost $800.

My next set was a 50 inch Panasonic Plasma and it was amazing. One of the best TVs I ever had and I think that’s why I favor OLED the last few years.

 

[Chronicle]

So, I recently made a thread about a youtuber who has OC'd his PS3 for better frame rate and found an interesting post:

And I wholeheartedly agree with this. Display manufacturers are some of the biggest pathological liars in the tech world who will advertise muddy jargon to sucker people into buying subpar products. For instance, they advertise(d) 60Hz TVs as 120Hz when it's false. They're 60Hz TVs with motion interpolation. Another scam is HDR. Since there is no standard, you find all kinds of tags such as: HDR10, HDR1000, HDR10+, HDR400 (which isn't even HDR), etc.

Never in my opinion has this hurt gaming more than in the PS360 era aka the era of the HD resolution. It was back then that a major push was made to sell LCD TVs with high-definition capabilities. Most at the time were 720p TVs but the average consumer didn't know the difference. It was HD and you on top, you had interlaced vs progressive scan, making things even more confusing. Back then, an HDMI cable was extremely expensive ($50+ for a 6ft one) but you HAD to have an HDTV, otherwise, you were missing out on the full potential of your gaming console. While it was cool to watch your football games on an HD TV (and let's be honest, most networks were slow as hell to deliver HD content with some taking years), the gaming experience was quite different.

What most people gaming on consoles (and I was one of them) didn't really talk about was how abysmal the performance was compared to the previous generation which had far more 60fps games than their newer, more powerful successors. It wasn't just 60fps, it was also the stability of 30fps games. We were sent back to the early 64-bit era performance-wise with many (dare I say most?) games running at sub 30fps and sub HD resolutions. Furthermore, the early HDTVs in fact looked much worse than the CRTs we had and I remember being thoroughly unimpressed with my spanking brand new 720p Sharp Aquos television compared to my trusty old Panasonic CRT. The same happened when I got my Samsung KS8000 4K TV, it was a step down from the Panasonic plasma I had before, and 4K while sharp and crisp wasn't worth tanking my fps. 1440p was just fine and the 980 Ti I had at the time simply wasn't enough to drive this many pixels.

It was easy to sell big numbers: 1080>720>480. More pixels = better and clearer image which was a load of horseshit because pixel count doesn't matter nearly as much for CRT TVs. Never mind the loss of perfect blacks and high contrast that the CRT TVs provided by default. Plasma were also quite a bit better than LCDs but suffered from burn-ins and high power consumption and were hot.

In my opinion, the PS360 consoles should have stuck to SD resolutions and CRT devices but aim for higher frame rates. 60fps at SD resolutions should have been doable. I played inFamous at a friend's home on a CRT and it looks great. Imagine if it was also running at 60fps. I've also been dusting up my old 360 and PS3 only to realize that most games I play run like shit compared to the standards of today.

Then PS4/X1 could have moved to 720p/60fps or 1080p/60fps for less demanding games (assuming a less shit CPU). 30fps would of course always be on the table. Current consoles could have been 1080p/60/ray tracing devices with graphics comparable or even exceeding 4K/30 modes and then PS6 would be the proper move to 4K which in my opinion without upscaling is a waste of GPU power.

Thoughts on the HD revolution and how it impacted gaming? Would you change anything? Were you happy with the results?

What?! Youre crazy. HD was the greatest thing to happen to gaming TV and bluray.

 

[Gaiff]

What?! Youre crazy. HD was the greatest thing to happen to gaming TV and bluray.

HD in and of itself wasn't the problem. The problems were mainly that the increase in resolution came with a huge penalty to performance. The second problem that most HD displays were LCDs and LCDs were plain bad. Your perfect blacks suddenly turned into drab greys.

Plasma were a different story but they died a horrible death. If the image quality of LCD held up, I would agree but coupled with the performance loss, I don't think it was good for gaming.

 

[Chronicle]

HD in and of itself wasn't the problem. The problems were mainly that the increase in resolution came with a huge penalty to performance. The second problem that most HD displays were LCDs and LCDs were plain bad. Your perfect blacks suddenly turned into drab greys.

Plasma were a different story but they died a horrible death. If the image quality of LCD held up, I would agree but coupled with the performance loss, I don't think it was good for gaming.

There were HD CRTs. Also that's if you bought a shit lcd. I was selling tvs at that time in my life and there were DLPs LCD rear projection, plasma, and good lcds. If you bought at Walmart then that's on you! HD was the best thing for gaming!

 

[Rendered Tangent]

Wasn't it a natural evolution?

Besides, if they had stayed in SD wouldn't it have looked strange as more and more manufacturers began offering HD as standard?

I mean, it could have given consumers the impression that the new systems were effectively already outdated at launch because they were being forced to run on old technology.

 

[bender]

240p for life.

 

[Gaiff]

There were HD CRTs.

True but they were like 100lbs+. I had a 50" that was around 150lbs which was crazy heavy.

Also that's if you bought a shit lcd. I was selling tvs at that time in my life and there were DLPs LCD rear projection, plasma, and good lcds. If you bought at Walmart then that's on you! HD was the best thing for gaming!

Even "good" LCDs were shit. All edge-lit with no local array dimming zones. There was no way to come anywhere near the contrast ratio of CRTs or plasma TVs. LCDs didn't start coming onto their own until the last few years. They sucked otherwise. Especially when they were first introduced. And that's ignoring that refresh rates on LCDs vs CRTs is a whole different story.

 

[MisterXDTV]

Wii launched in 2006 with obsolete tech, although not sure what people make of that in the grand scheme of things.

Wii wasn't a traditional console (just like the Switch) and was barely more powerful than the GameCube from 2001

Playstation and Xbox couldn't do that

 

[64bitmodels]

LCDs didn't start coming onto their own until the last few years. They sucked otherwise. Especially when they were first introduced. And that's ignoring that refresh rates on LCDs vs CRTs is a whole different story.

eh even then OLED exists which blows them out of the water in IQ. i wish we got more OLED monitors though