Does the PS3 upscale natively 720p games to 1080p?

WDeranged

Established Member
Joined
Sep 11, 2008
Messages
86
Reaction score
4
Points
13
I've read a fair amount of threads on the matter and I'm lacking a definitive answer.

From my experience it doesn't, I got myself a 1080p screen yesterday and though 1080p stuff is looking amazing I was slightly disheartened when I saw menus and hard edges in 720p games looking slightly ragged.

I've had a good search through the options on the ps3 and I'm pretty sure I've not missed anything so is it a fact that the ps3 leaves upscaling 720p games to your tv (rarely the best quality)?

Peace
 
AFAIK the PS3 upscales the games to 1080p

Later on I'll plug the ps3 into my projector and put a 720p game in to get you a 100% definitive answer as it will tell me the input signal information.Hopefully I've got one game that just says 720p on the back and another that says 720p 1080p :)

You should try setting your PS3 to output 720p anyway and let your TV do the upscaling and compare the image, you may get better results than you think from your TV's scaler. On a plus side though the PS3's upscaling of standard DVDs is pretty damn good compared to any TV I've seen so definitely output 1080p from the PS3 for those :)

Rob
 
Last edited by a moderator:
No it doesn't :mad:

Drives me mad, even COD4 which supports 1080i/p defaults to 720p if you have 720p enabled. To force COD4 to play at 1080p I have to untick the 720p option.

I don't think the game looks that different, but my display is happiest with a 1080p signal.

Many (most) games default to 480p if you don't have 720p enabled.

The 360 seems to be able to upscale all games I've tried to 1080p, so why the PS3 can't is beyond me.

Rant over :devil:
 
No it doesn't :mad:

Drives me mad, even COD4 which supports 1080i/p defaults to 720p if you have 720p enabled. To force COD4 to play at 1080p I have to untick the 720p option.

I don't think the game looks that different, but my display is happiest with a 1080p signal.

Many (most) games default to 480p if you don't have 720p enabled.

The 360 seems to be able to upscale all games I've tried to 1080p, so why the PS3 can't is beyond me.

Rant over :devil:

The 360 has a built in hardware scaler, that's why it upscales all games to 1080p.

Funnily enough COD4 only runs at about 600p natively but is upscaled to 720p by software on the PS3 and the scaling chip on the 360.
 
so i think the answer is untick 720p and it will force 1080p :thumbsup:


my experience is that with my 1080p Projector when i feed it a 720p signal it looks really quite naff, not really a lack of detail but everything is hard edged, sharpness is too high (as you calibrate to 1080p with some extra edge as 1080p is able to take it and can look too smooth without) the colours arent as nice and generally with ps3 jaggies combined it looks cack.

ive really noticed the difference between 720p projector and 1080p as i have a loan 720p pj at the moment whilst mine is upgraded ! there is a big difference on a projector for sure.
 
Yeah i guess the difference is more noticeable because i'm assuming your picture is huge ?

People still swear that the human eye cannot really tell the difference between the two at lower than 50inch in size...

Surely most TV's would do a better job of upscaling ?!
 
As has been said the PS3 does not contain any scaling h/w so any scaling is done in software. Several games will scale to 1080p if your TV does not support 720p, some people force this to happen by disabling 720p. In my opinion its pretty pointless as all the PS3 does to scale it is stretch the frame to 1080p which your TV will do just as well if not better. Forcing the PS3 to do it may result in slightly worse performance.
 
Yeah i guess the difference is more noticeable because i'm assuming your picture is huge ?

People still swear that the human eye cannot really tell the difference between the two at lower than 50inch in size...

Surely most TV's would do a better job of upscaling ?!

the people who have said it are clearly blind ? :confused:

1080p across the whole screen looks 'deeper' i.e not as flat 2d like with lower resolution.

if you played farcry at 320x240 like a snes resolution with blocky pixelation due to lack of res would the image seem 3D in depth ? no... so the higher you go (to a point) the finer and more linear the image appears.

if your sat at work now (or at home on your pc reading this) lower your screen res and tell me it looks as good at the lower res as it does the higher ? yes there is a scaling issue but in general if you then remember back to when monitors were 800x600 i think you will agree the new 1280 x1024 and higher lcd`s look a lot crisper and have better colours as there is more information to show the extra colour graduations.


the final argument is distance.. but ive always seen on these threads and in peoples homes they have larger screens than recommended for viewing distance, if anything the beauty of a higher resolution image is that focus can be maintained and no pixel structure sat closer watching a large image.


just my two pence
 
If you have both 720p and 1080p ticked in the XMB, then each game will select the option which the developers decided is the best for that game. Forcing one selection over another will almost always result in an inferior result.

In almost all cases, the hardware scaler in your TV will be better than doing it in software, and for decent quality TVs the hardware scaler will most likely beat the hardware scaler in consoles too.

At the end of the day, unless you try two modes back to back and notice a significant benefit at your usual playing distance in the non-default mode, don't force any options and let the professionals decide :smashin:

[The only game I can think of where the non-default is better is Rainbow Six Vegas, which defaults to 1080p if you have both options selected, yet is much blurrier than the non-default 720p.]
 
My tv displays what resolution is being fed to it and most ps3 games show as 720p, apart from the games that are intended for 1080p and of course 1080p blu-rays.

If you remove 720p from the resolutions list the ps3 downscales the game to 520p.
 
If you have both 720p and 1080p ticked in the XMB, then each game will select the option which the developers decided is the best for that game. Forcing one selection over another will almost always result in an inferior result.

I have notice no performance issues with COD4 @ 1080p on the PS3. Still plays better than 99% of other FPS games.

Why on earth didn't Sony include a hardware scaler in the PS3? Maybe they thought they could do it in software, but it turned out the console wasn't powerful enough?
 
If you have both 720p and 1080p ticked in the XMB, then each game will select the option which the developers decided is the best for that game. Forcing one selection over another will almost always result in an inferior result.

Exactly:smashin:

Workshed said:
As has been said the PS3 does not contain any scaling h/w so any scaling is done in software

Not true, it does but only scales horizontally:)
 
I'm thinking the same thing, seems a shame, though I'm not saying 720p looks terrible when my tv does the scaling, move another foot away and you can barely tell.
 
OK , tested this out checking the source signal information on my projector and the results are as people have been saying:

two games that are blatently internally rendered at 720p ish

NBA 09 - Does not permit up-scaling to 1080p. output is 720p at best . if you remove everything except 1080p and the mandatory 576p in video setting then it outputs the game at 576p .

Ninja Gaiden Sigma - Does scaling if you have 1080p and 720p selected it will output at 1080p upscaled to 1080p . I removed 1080p so it outputs 720p so the hardware scaler in my projector upscales it to 1080p and the image is practically the same although the projector seems to smooth out the image a bit more making jaggies less apparent but at the expense of a crisper image.

bottom line if the game supports it, it will upscale 720p to 1080p if not it switches the output to 720p .

'Next gen gaming starts with 1080p and the PS3', Sony *cough* :s
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Where are the tick boxes to select what the native resolution used is :confused: :confused: :confused:

I have a 1080p set connected via HDMI but I would like the game to choose what resolution to use, be it 720p/1080p

Or in other words I don't want it to force 1080p, if it can do it BONUS! but if not, i'd rather it displayed in it's native res.

Chris.
 
so in summary..................

or should i say to point out to us thickos on here

what is best to have ticked and unticked.
 
I'm keeping all resolutions ticked, I don't see have any 720p games that benefit from forcing 1080p and like I said if you're sitting far back enough you can barely tell (on menus mainly).

This is for a 1080p set of course, if your TV's maximum res is 720p then untick 1080i and 1080p.

Peace
 
if you played farcry at 320x240 like a snes resolution with blocky pixelation due to lack of res would the image seem 3D in depth ? no... so the higher you go (to a point) the finer and more linear the image appears.

If you play Far Cry at 320x240 upscaled to 1080p it will still look rubbish because the game is not rendering 1080p its rendering 320x240.
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom