Last weak European game developers descended on Brighton for the Develop Conference to discuss all manner of gaming subjects, mainly, as the name suggests, regarding current and future development, who'd have guessed?
Sony's Simon Benson was at the conference discussing the company's latest push into 3D technology with the PlayStation 3 and he indicated that they intend to limit 3D PS3 games to a maximum 720p, a far cry from the full 1080p some games employ such as WipEout HD and Super Stardust HD. Blu-Ray movies however are exempt from the capped resolution, 3D movies which will be playable on the PS3 later this year will be able to take full advantage of the consoles 1080p display.
Simon Benson further went on to say that the 720p limit could be relaxed for a more cinematic game over an action orientated one, but that would depend on the title itself. Motorstorm wouldn't be able to use the full 1080p for instance, whereas a title such as the classic Monkey Island remakes would be since the frame rate wouldn't need to be as high. So why are Sony forcing developers to use lower resolutions in 3D?
The answer lies with the HDMI 1.4 3D support, more specifically that the specification was designed with Blu-Ray movie playback at 24 frames per second, not gaming's 1080p 60fps. The current generation of games usually are 30fps or 60fps in some cases, the higher the frame rate, the smoother the picture, as such, you can pretty much imagine what WipEout HD would look like at 24fps instead of its usual 60fps.
The way the console displays this image is using two images (one for each eye) to produce the 3D image, so having two 720p images displayed at 60fps is a lot smoother than having two 1080p images running at the much lower 24fps.
There's obviously a difference between a 720p and a 1080p image, but the real question is, can you tell or even see the difference? The answer is of course yes, but only to some degree, because the average gamer or movie watcher wouldn't really see much of an improvement, or even know if there was one, and by all accounts people would much rather have a silky smooth picture over a jerky high definition one.
So the current 3D enabled PlayStation 3 games such as Super Stardust HD and WipEout HD which run in 1080p native aren't actually running at the same high definition standard in 3D, they're being downscaled to 720p to accommodate the higher frame rate.
Simon Benson who gave the talk also reiterated that the PS3 will have 3D Blu-Ray support when the new firmware update gets deployed in September, an update which will also enable YouTube 3D playback.
