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IGN admits their pre-release Ghosts footage wasn't 1080p after all
- Thread starter Glass Shark
- Start date
As is typically the case, Occam's razor is rather more sharp. It seems less than likely that numerous gaming media sites who make a living from discussing, amongst other things, the technical issues in games were completely oblivious to the differences between 1080p and 720p output - even when their consumers informed them that something was clearly off with what they were doing.
There's certainly no shortage of stupidity. The unfortunate issue with Hanlon's razor is that stupidity and malice are often perfect bedmates.
Killing_Joke
Member
*shakes hand*
We're done here folks. GAF figured this out in 5 minutes and they waited a month to finally admit this? After all the checks cleared and bulk of holiday shopping is over? LMAO. Fuck off.
Explain why you don't agree with it. DF's BF4 and CoD comparisons especially have been great and have illustrated the differences quite well. I may have missed an article here or there but I haven't seen anything controversial in the DF comparisons since launch.
thelatestmodel
Junior, please.
Uh-oh.
Killing_Joke
Member
No one is biased. They go where the money is. Either they took some checks to make some "mistakes" or they're completely incompetent. Pick your poison.
GysahlGreens
Member
Except they make no statement that they won't do it again, lol. Otherwise, spot on
It's fishy why the whole industry waited this long to do the real comparison.
Nothing fishy about Polygon's take. Imo, they've been entrenched in bias and double standards from day one, even down to their inception and that $750,000 documentary fund. But yea, this whole debacle has really put the magnifying glass of shame atop many of the outlets in gaming journalism. Polygon, Penny Arcade, Gizmodo and ArsTechnica have come off the worst imo.
Teletraan1
Banned
After reading all the post release comparisons everything has been pretty much above board. The only shady shit was from RL prior to the launch of the products where he was doing those softball interviews with the MS tech fellows who were just using it as a soapbox for that balance spin. Those articles rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and any further mistrust probably stems from that. Probably similar to the mistrust people have with MS themselves after the DRM. Some people were ready to go back after the 180 others will never buy it.
mattiewheels
And then the LORD David Bowie saith to his Son, Jonny Depp: 'Go, and spread my image amongst the cosmos. For every living thing is in anguish and only the LIGHT shall give them reprieve.'
I know GAF is very different, but if you showed these to people who play games but don't think too hard about it, they'd shrug their shoulders and wonder what difference it makes. And these websites know this, because that's who they're writing for. I prefer 1080 all the way, but there needs to be an acceptance that there's a vast swath of people who don't even notice stuff like this, and that is okay for the mainstream press to acknowledge.It's fishy why the whole industry waited this long to do the real comparison.
joecanada
Member
Good post... to sum up, if IGN isn't able to do their job properly then they are irrelevant. period.
Incompetent. And wouldn't them receiving money to negatively review one version (which they didn't really did they?) make them biased? I'm confused now....
I think I'll pick the poison and be done with myself.
You are misapplying Occam's razor. The most simple explanation is that through the power of suggestion the people truly believed they were seeing 1080p. Give people cheap cuts of meat next to fine china and silver cutlery and they will tell you without fail how excellent quality the meat was. They were told the game runs at 1080p, the PS4 said the game was 1080p and their TVs said they were getting 1080p.
It rather absurd to think of the most simple explanation to be a complex conspiracy to deceive the gaming public, but as you said, there certainly is no shortage of stupidity...
Uncle Rupee
Banned
IGN should be banned for this.
Does anyone care about games anymore?
IGN may or may not be a good site, its a moot point. You should only be concerned about whether a site can tell you how much you would enjoy playing a game. But this has long ago taken a back seat to telling you which irrelevant technical detail is better on some scale to another.
And this whole hang up with resolution... Honestly I wish this whole generation was 720p. I dare anyone to find any game that looks as good as a 720p bluray. You wont find a single one. How about any game that looks as good as a film in 480p? Again you wont find one.
Resolution is a false god, always has been. Just go take a look at the hires PC screenshot thread. So many terrible looking pin sharp images. If that extra processing power was spent on more filters, effects and higher detail the games would look so much better.
This is one of the daftest posts I've seen in a long while. If you're asking me whether I'd prefer to play a game as good looking as Shadow Fall or DriveClub in 1080p or something as good looking as a movie in 480p, I'd pick the former, because the latter would just be great looking but highly blurry with little to no macro detailing. A bit like 480p videos blown up on a 1080p screen today. Only you'd probably never get that infinite AA or extreme down sampled clean image required to mimic movies or CGI films, even at 720p, nor should you need to. Games like Ryse, Knack and Shadow Fall already look very clean.
DriveClub is already reaching early levels of gaming photo realism even at 1080p, so there's that too. And you can bet we'll have the Sorcerer demo graphics in 1080p too this gen.
The next daft point is this notion that 720p will give you movie like graphics whilst 1080p will give you much worse. Wrong. 1080p is not that much more resource intensive, not with a capable enough GPU with enough ram and so on to spare. The better the GPU, the higher the performance degradation ceiling, and the less demanding 1080p is to run on it.
I didn't know DF did a comparison yet. This was the first one I'd seen, and I was actually trying to find one for almost two weeks. But still, why wait 12 days after you have the two versions in your office with no embargo to finally show the difference to potential buyers? Just seems strange. They picked the most popular game series, with the largest difference and decided to wait almost two weeks and long after the xbox one launch to finally release the comparison.
So there is no excuse for xbone games not being 1080p then?
And you are completely missing the point. It is not about how clean an image is. Of course those games have clean images when there is so little going on. Drop the resolution and you can still have a clean image but with far more happening. And you know its not just about 'clean', life is not just clean. 4K PC games are clean, they still look horribly unrealistic.
We are not anywhere near photo realistic yet. Maybe when inside a building with bare walls we can get there, but compare a film of a busy city with that in a game, the difference is massive. Take something like GTA5. Run it in 4K if you like, its never going to be realistic. But take the power needed to run at 4K to improve it at 720p and then you have a much better looking prospect.
Are you getting it now?
CrunchyFrog
Member
Incredible, just awe-inspiring. I'm not the tinfoil hat type normally but come on, there HAD to be some money changing hands for there to be such a colossal and widespread output of targeted misinformation like this.
Higher resolution is only the easiest way to take advantage of the extra GPU power. In time, I fully expect PS4 games to run at similar resolutions as X1 but beef up assets and lighting with the extra resources. Similar to running a PC game with higher settings. The PS4 GPU is better in every aspect. It just requires more effort than what goes into a launch game to take advantage of it. That said, with Ghosts, the difference to how the environment looks is noticeable.
I think it depends more on your monitor or TV. If you have a well calibrated 1080p monitor I expect 90% of gamers would notice the difference.
I'm just going to assume that they said it looked better on the Ps4 to sound like they knew what they were looking at. I still remember all the everyone saying how the Xbox was equal or better and used IGN as a source. I think the whole them getting paid by Microsoft may not be related to this mistake, but it sure as hell did slow down this announcement.This just proves how useless gaming journalism is on some sites.
To "care about games" does not preclude the ability to discern graphical superiority between two versions of the same product.
The Xbox One has a far less capable GPU, and more constricted ram system, that's why less of its games are 1080p compared to the PS4. Like I said, worse GPUs have lower performance degradation ceilings, and it's already showing with the Xbox One.
And with respect to photo realism, I got your point. I was talking about something entirely different (IQ cleanliness over lighting, shaders, Ray tracing etc). we're certainly getting closer to photo realism, though I doubt we'll ever fully reach it. See DriveClub, Ryse, The Order 1886, The Sorcerer and so on. We'll be able to get even closer still, even at 1080p (on the PS4). The difference in resource intensiveness between 720p and 1080p is not enough to be the difference between photo realistic and not photo realistic. That was my point. Wanting 720p games is silly. You're just sacrificing texture detail and IQ, and will have to make room for a more resource hogging AA solution to make up for the added jaggies and shimmering 720p adds too.
nah.. IGN won't be banned for this.
Polygon have done worst, and GAF still put hits on it.
Parakeetman
No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
I think the Polygon hate is more geared towards that Arthur Gies? fellow that writes for Polygon than Polygon itself.
Ryse says otherwise. Personally I think it is telling that the best looking game of the next generation is the 900p one.
Have a read of this:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-focus-does-pixel-count-matter
'the same level of detail can be resolved in gaming without recourse to a 1080p framebuffer'
Some people are finally seeing the light. If we want better graphics we should stop worrying about resolution. It is getting in the way of progress, not helping it. But Sony do have 4K TVs to sell, PS5 will be all about the 4K and it will be so easy for marketing people to rip apart another console that isn't. I guess we are stuck in the sharpness race to blindness.
TetraGenesis
Member
Rightfully so.
Ryse is also not 720p, and does lack the IQ detail of the 1080p games, but considerably less so given it still has 56% more pixels than 720p, and a great AA solution. It's also considerably more linear and less open, or large scale as some of the other games in contention. On the topic of what is the best looking next gen game, that's purely subjective. I happen to think Shadow Fall and NBA 2K14 (for what it's aiming to do) look better overall, but opinions and all that.
Also please do not link to any Richard Leadbetter written article to prove a point. That's like linking to the O'Reilly or Glenn Beck of gaming journalists and tech experts. I read this article when it was posted some while back and it is altogether rather pointless and misguided. Essentially a lower resolution apologists piece with little basis or merit.
It's ironic that Alan Wake is trumpeted as a promotional example, when it was it's low resolution and IQ on the 360 that completely hampered it's overall visual appeal.
Complex? Claiming 720p video is 1080p video is about as complex a "conspiracy" as Microsoft getting all their reps to claim that dedicated servers increase the XBone's performance by 400%, or Microsoft and certain members of the gaming press implying that people didn't like Microsoft's DRM since they "weren't ready for the future", or hey let's sell a $106 "micro"transaction at the worst possible rate and put "Great deal!" by it! Fortunately that last one got nixed at some point, but I don't think forgive and forget is wise in this case as it shows a pattern of behavior. That pattern is not one of simple incompetence.
Here's a fun link: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...s-runs-at-1080p-and-60fps-on-xbox-one-and-ps4
It's not a complex conspiracy. A conspiracy has the connotation of actually achieving something. This has been a completely failed attempt, at every level, to market something other than reality. Once again stupidity and malice tend to go hand in hand.
There is no indication they intentionally misled people.
By "they" I assume you mean specifically IGN or perhaps the games media in general. No of course there isn't. And there never will be. I expect the truth is something more along the lines of them being given certain assurances which were not true and are now safely tucked away in NDAs. At the same time I don't think that's an excuse for their actions. There comes a time when you need to learn from your actions and start to look at things more critically. Of course in a way that also translates to biting the hand that feeds given the monetization structure of these sites. Somebody somewhere likely assured them repeatedly that the output was 1080p and so they ran with it with, at minimum, a lack of any critical consideration of what they were being told. And if they're not actually questioning or at least critiquing what they're being told and instead just then regurgitating that to their audience then what is separating the "games media" from just being another PR outlet?
Who cares if its not 720p? Point is that is one of the lower resolution games that looks far better than all the 1080p games. If resolution = better then why does Ryse look better than 1080p games?
And who cares who wrote the article? They are quoting others, people from nvidia mainly, but that is not relevant either. Argue with the facts presented, not your personal opinions of the messenger.
ZeroMaverick
Member
You know what's funny? IGN is actually the original source of that saying. They started it.
Sigh... Please understand the very conspiracy you yourself are presenting. The conspiracy is not the claim, it is how the people involved are coerced to do it. You are claiming a multinational is in bed with many small media companies to screw over another multinational company. How did this all get setup? How are the payments handled and covered up? This is massively more complicated than just some people believing what they are told via many sources.
moniker
Member
Now this is funny considering you'd have to render the game at 4K+ resolutions and downsample to 720p to get anywhere near the IQ of 720p film content.
Again I'm not sure what conspiracy you're trying to brew here. You're the one that keeps claiming this is all some giant conspiracy. It all seems very simple - idiotically so. Microsoft is already openly engaging in deceptive marketing. If they're willing to claim openly and in public that dedicated servers increase the performance of the XBone by 400% can you even begin to imagine the sort of stuff they're saying behind closed doors and "legal-walled" by NDAs? The same is true of Actvision who went from claiming, as a matter of principle and fact, that both were 1080p 60fps to only enabling 1080p in one version through a patch. In a way one can almost feel bad for the gaming sites, but once again I rather expect their ignorance was, at least in part, voluntary so they're certainly still responsible for their actions.
Please, wont someone think of the children?
2013 will go down in gaming history as the year when people suddenly tried to argue that resolution was irrelevant.
nelsonroyale
Member
Please, wont someone think of the children?
2013 will go down in gaming history as the year when people suddenly tried to argue that resolution was irrelevant.
Its rather bizarre. I remember playing crysis several years ago, and the bump between 720p and 1080p was very noticible to me...I am honestly not bothered much about resolution above 1080p, but 1080p is the baseline I think devs should hit...
Wait a minute...that article is from 6 months ago and the guy said that Infinity Ward told him CoD: Ghosts was 1080p on both new consoles. You can't be f'ing serious, you are using that as 'evidence' of deceptive marketing by MS in some grand conspiracy? Wow. Surely I have got this wrong and you aren't suggesting that, because if you are actually serious, I think you need to take a much needed break from the internet. Seriously, my head almost implodes daily at the batshit crazy conspiracies I read every day, and it is even more scary that so many other people believe this crap.
So, do I have it wrong, or is that what you were suggesting? If the answer is yes, I concede defeat. I'd rather walk away before I do permanent damage to my brain.
jizzlobber
Member
Everyone puts shit on polygon, but at least they reported what they saw (no noticeable difference in resolution) and not what they think they saw (ie ign saying the difference is noticeable when the res was the same).
At least they know what they are looking at, ign have no rocking idea.
I remember everyone slamming polygon over their comments, I say well done for picking the lower rest when all signs were saying it'd be 1080p.
At least they know what they are looking at, ign have no rocking idea.
I remember everyone slamming polygon over their comments, I say well done for picking the lower rest when all signs were saying it'd be 1080p.
It's fishy why the whole industry waited this long to do the real comparison.
Dem crushed blacks and whites. Yummy.
why is this gif mirrored? I just randomly watched this episode today, and it instantly struck me that whomever made this gif mirrored it.
Isn't this missing the point a bit? The whole resolution debate is to do with the exact same games, none of which are photorealistic, being at 1080p on the ps4 and sub 1080p on the xbone. If both consoles were running at the same resolution with the same assets, the ps4's power would be wasted. Devs essentially get a resolution boost for free, why not use it? Upping the resolution is pretty much the easiest way to get a game looking better without much more work. If devs wanted to use the spare power they have left when keeping the resolution at 720p on more models and more polys then they're free to do so but it's gonna be the ps4 that sees these upgrades.
And the whole 480p movie looks better than games nonsense, no shit. We are nowhere near the power needed to have scenes that dense, textures that complex, material rendering that exact and lighting that complex. If you were to render a scene photorealisticly modeled and lighted, with no reused models at 480p you be lucky to get one frame a day. Everything in games has to be faked and we can tell it's faked. Adding more filters, models and effects isn't going to make any game look like real life for quite a while yet.
Edit: Am I reading that last part right? That the most graphically impressive games available, rendered at above 1080p then downsampled, look terrible because they're too sharp? Or do you mean they just look "bad" because "wasted potential"?
There's also "purposefully misleading consumers/viewers, because that's what will provide hits."
Do *YOU* enjoy games anymore?
I don't need a website to tell me I'll enjoy something. I can tell from videos if something is up my alley, and any opinions I need I'll ask gamers who's opinions I trust to not be filled with stupid reasoning and hypocrisy. (and who would actually like that type of game to begin with)
IHaveCandy
Banned
Have you seen Shadowfall?