22nd March 2006, 4:13 PM
lazyfatbum Wrote:yes, but the texture sets are not super high res, the display is, the textures are not. Also if you compress a texture you might as well not make an HD game, compressing them often leaves the textures looking very flat and muddy (N64) because it litteraly takes everything you drew out in photoshop or whatever and then blurs the krap out of it, mixing the colors, etc. the more you compress it, the krappier they get. You could uncompress the textures and put the full HD textures on the internal RAM during load but if you dont have a few gigs of RAM, you'll have a level with with the same handful of HD textures over and over until it reloads an area.
it's best to either leave it totally uncompressed and spun off as needed or just upload the entire thing to a hard drive. 360 does the first one by picking and choosing what textures to spin and what textures to load. from what understand, there still hasn't been a fully HD game on 360 because of that process.
As far as rendering at the upconverted res, i think that's exactly what they're going to do; just like pumping up th resolution on zSNES emus during gameplay and everything gets crisper. But frame rates and the like will probably take the same hits they took on the PSX and PS2, the PS3 is going to be an emulator afterall. for example, PS1 games still take frame rate hits on the PS2. so I dont see that being fixed.
<img src="http://abouttheimage.typepad.com/abouttheimage/images/Cuddly_Kitten1.jpg">
I thought the PS3 would do a lot less emulating than the 360 because the hardware uses similar architecture. I suppose I could be misinformed.
On the topic of PC games in high res, you are stating the texture resolution currently being used in modern PC games is not in high res? Are you sure?
Oh and, just a nitpic, but it depends on HOW you compress the textures. If you stick a texture file into a zip file, you can compress it without any data loss at all (try it, duplicate an image file, zip one, unzip it, and do a direct binary compare of the one that hasn't been compressed to the one that was zipped and unzipped, they will be identical). Lossless compression is easy. For example, I can compress "dog dog dog dog dog dog dog", which takes up 27 bytes of data, into "dog x 7", which takes up 7 bytes of data, with no loss at all. The issue is that the ability to translate that correctly (adding the spaces and typing out the word dog and all that correct syntax) has to already be on the computer, and it also takes up some extra processing power. JPEGs, which are one way of compressing an image, do NOT compress losslessly, nor do MP3s. It's possible, just not as "effective" as lossy compression methods.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)