God of War III - 1080i

Kato

For the life of me, I can not figure this one out. I have a Samsung 6000 LED tv, 40 inch. It displays naturally in 1920x1080 for HD, blu-ray, anything. But for some reason, anytime I put GOW3 in my PS3 and play it, it displays at 720P. The TV display when it changes resolutions pops up and says 720p. I have looked all over the settings inside GOW and I can't find anything that switches the screen resolution. My PS3 plays other games in full 1080i and blu-rays as well, even netflix can stream at 1080i. How can I get GOW to display in 1080i?

vonPoonBurGer

God of War 3's native resolution is 720p, and it will always display in its native resolution where possible. I think you can force it to 1080p by disabling 720p output on the PS3, but all that's going to get you is a 720p image upscaled to 1080p. If you want to try it anyway, from the main menu go to Settings > Display Settings > Video Output Settings, choose your connector (almost certainly HDMI), and when it gives you the list of resolutions supported by your TV make sure you uncheck everything except 1080p. That should cause the PS3 to upscale it to your TV's native resolution.

But have you really gained anything by doing that? Right now, your PS3 is sending a 720p signal and the TV is upscaling it. Any way you slice it, when you play GoW3 on a 1080p TV, you're getting a 720p signal upscaled to 1080p, it's just a question of who does the scaling. LCDs and plasmas always have to scale signals to their native panel resolution, so they include scaling hardware built in. I'd bet your TV's scaling gear is at least as good as the PS3's, possibly better. If nothing else, letting the PS3 output 720p means you're shifting some load off the PS3 and onto the TV's dedicated scaling hardware.

Note that you don't want 1080i, definitely not on your TV anyway. The "i" stands for interlaced, and interlacing is bad. 720p would likely look better than 1080i, especially in fast motion scenes where interlacing artifacts can cause noticeable bluriness. Bad interlacing looks like this:

Kratos doesn't want to be interlaced. :evil:

Post Blue

That just means that the signal your PS3 is sending to your TV is 720p, which is determined by how the content is buffered and varies from game to game. Unlike the 360, the PS3 doesn't have a hardware scaler, and so your TV does the work by taking that 1280x720 signal and mapping it to its 1920x1080 pixels.

vonPoonBurGer

There is a scaler chip in the PS3, but it wasn't exposed in the PS3 development SDK until almost a year after the PS3 launched, and even then only some scaling functionality was given to developers. There must have bern some deep technical mcgubbins as to why game developers couldn't make use of the scaler chip, but I have no idea what they are (were?). Maybe that limitation was removed in later firmware revisions, I'm not sure. Bottom line, I'd stick with 720p and let the TV handle scaling.

Post Blue

Oh wow, I didn't even realize that you had posted a much more thorough version of what I said. Very cool.

That's crazy about the PS3 scaler. I had thought it just lacked one all together.

Kato

Wow. Thanks guys. That explains a lot. They just want to confuse you when they list 1080i on the back of the box

Post Blue

I'm pretty sure that means that if you have a TV that doesn't map pixels (like a CRT), the game can be resolved at 1080i, which looks great on displays that are meant to display interlaced signals.