Tuesday 27 April 2010

PS3 Can't Do Full HD3D

SCEE’s stereoscopic team confirms earlier predictions that corners must be cut for 3D gaming

Any games that receive a retrospective 3D adaptation for PS3 will likely see their resolution and graphical clout cut in order to maintain a smooth performance, according to two developers working in SCEE’s stereoscopic team.

The admission backs up claims by Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades earlier this month when he pointed out that current hardware simply isn’t up to delivering full 3D at 1080p at 60Hz.

Now Sony has confessed that the 3D versions of both WipEout HD and MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, both of which will be given free to anyone who buys one of Sony’s 3D Bravia TVs, will suffer texture and resolution drops.

“WipEout HD was originally 1080p at 60Hz – obviously a good foundation to start from but in making the 3D build of this we had to go for two 720p images,” senior development manager Simon Benson told Digital Foundry.

“Because it was 60Hz we could just drop to 30Hz and in actual fact, that was it. There was no more work to do. That worked. It took very little time getting the game into 3D; there were very few problems with WipEout.”

However, converting MotorStorm: Pacific rift into 3D was even more daunting.

As the game runs at the lower resolution and frame rate of 720p and 30Hz respectively, the developers had to rework the split-screen two player mode that already reduced the amount of graphical detail, allowing it to effectively run two games at once. The end result is that single player 3D MotorStorm suffers the same graphical compromises found in the two-player version in the original title.

Whether future titles built for 3D from the ground-up will be able to overcome these challenges remains to be seen.

5 comments:

  1. Not really surprising - double the images (one for each eye instead of one for both) seems like obvious math to me. Am glad to hear that Wipeout has dropped in resolution instead of framerate for it though... 30hz would kill that game.

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  2. Motorstorm will look pretty crappy then. What about Super Stardust HD 3D though? I've not seen it yet but I wouldn't be surprised if House Maruqe put the other developers to shame with this.

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  3. @el stefio - you're right that they have to produce double the images at the moment to get the 3d effect. So it requires twice the performance of the original game. However, this is just because Sony are hurrying to get something out in order to try to shift 3D TV sets. In time I hope that a different technique will be invented for making 3D games from the ground up.

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  4. or you could just do the most effective, simplest, easiest method of doing camera tracking much similar that seen with the Wii-IR mod or the DS 3d-esque titles.

    Position of person to camera alters the image on screen to create the illusion of 3D...and its a hella more impressive than "double image/pseudo colour/polarisation"

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  5. or you could, if you're $ony and feeling the need to claim a bit of customer goodwill back after being tools for a long time just have included the iZ3D graphics driver into a Firmware patch and let us play games on a normal tv in anaglyph triovision 3D, you could just have an option in the system/display settings to turn it on or off. simples.

    but then i guess they couldn't shill us all for a new tv, glasses, etc.

    was in Currys yesterday, £2000 for a 42" with 1.4 HDMI holes and mad interwebby connectivity stchuffs that no one will use. or £1800 for 1.3 HDMI and no interwebs. oh, and what the hell is 'mega dynamic contrast'? normal dynamic contrast bugs me while gaming, messing up my HUD brightness so i never us it.

    i wonder what $ony thinks of as 'affordable'

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