Haze Devs Discuss Resolution Issues

[CSN NewsBot]

Recently, Haze was found not to run at a native 720p resolution. Commonly seen as the start of "true HD" visuals, 720p has been the standard for games on the latest generation of consoles. Haze runs at a native resolution of 1024x576, and uses upscaling to make up for the loss of those 144 lines of resolution.



Here's what Free Radical's Creative Lead on the project, Derek Littlewood, had to say on the matter.

We prioritise a nice smooth framerate over a different res," Littlewood told Ripten.



"Personally, I don't really buy the whole thing. People did the same with Call of Duty, they did the same with Halo, and they say with those games 'It's not running at true HD!'



"I don't care. If the game looks good and it runs smoothly, those are the important things to me. I don't understand why people care whether there's 20 pixels, 50 pixels, or 100 pixels more...

Another popular title to be seen running at a resolution lower than 720p is the PS3 version of Grand Theft Auto IV. It just goes to show that more does not always equal "better."

[sathanas]

If the game is good nobody will care there's a few missing lines.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

Edited by [user="26841"] @ [time="1211217345"]

I have a bit of an issue with this. If you're assuming playing at 4:3 then it's less of an issue, but from my understanding 720p is defined as a 16:9 resolution.



In this case it's 1024x576 as opposed to 1280x720 -- you're not just losing 144 lines of vertical resolution, you're losing 256 lines of horizontal resolution as well.



Basically you're dropping from a 0.92MP picture to a 0.59MP picture... giving you a 36% drop in drawn pixels and thus visual clarity. When you're talking about a game running on systems that use 720p native gaming as a selling point, I think it's a big deal.



That said, because it's drawing less than 2/3 as many pixels, you're getting a roughly corresponding 1/3 performance boost. We're all used to having to sacrifice either resolution or detail settings on PC games for playable framerates, so they've just made those decisions for you. That's just how things go, and smooth framerate definitely is more important in my opinion as well.



Still, the response "I don't understand why people care whether there's 20 pixels, 50 pixels, or 100 pixels more..." is highly misleading when you think about the fact that we're talking about well over three hundred and thirty thousand pixels that aren't being rendered. If you're running with just the 4:3 ratio assumption you're only dropping by 20% which isn't as bad, but even then you're dropping from 0.74MP to 0.59MP, losing over 100k pixels, not 20/50/100 pixels. :P

[HEAD NOOB]

console hardware being maxed out already?

[WooFerPPK]

not that i care that much, but wasn't the ps3 supposed to be this giant powerhouse that should be able to run everything at 1080p and last 10 years?

[Ryosuke T]

never knew that gta4 for ps3 had lower resolution than 720p. if im too lazy to wait for it to come out for pc, i'll get a copy/rent one for 360 then.

[Linux]

WooFerPPK wrote..

not that i care that much, but wasn't the ps3 supposed to be this giant powerhouse that should be able to run everything at 1080p and last 10 years?

Yeah, but they failed at making a console that can even compare to it. I got fired from Sony to make more money for the PS3, they cut half the customer service people they hired 2 weeks later at the San Diego Call center LOL.