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Is this Dithering?

Thrakier

Member
I'm playing God of War II and specially in Progressive Scan I can sometimes see horizontal or vertical lines (depends) almost like it's "in" the background. Hard to describe. It's not so noticeable with PS off. I have a Samsung 4065.
 
So what could this lines be? I can see them in Resident Evil 4 too, because of that I thought it could be dithering. But I really don't know.
 
Dithering is basically a "screendoor" effect. Instead of doing true transparency on a polygon's texture, they just render every other pixel in the bitmap.
 
take some pics and show us as i have no idea what it is you're describing with horizontal and vertical lines.

the only thing it sounds like to me is tearing, but you claim that's not it.
 
You'll see it in games that aren't 24-bit colour and above. It basically happens where a system is trying to render a gradient of colour or a particular hue that isn't within the bounds of the available pallette. As someone else has mentioned, you'll see it on transparency effects also.

Smoke is a good one. There's a lot of fog / smoke lingering in the air in RE4, that's why it's easy to see it in that game. It's barely noticable in most games though.
 
FlyinJ said:
Dithering is basically a "screendoor" effect. Instead of doing true transparency on a polygon's texture, they just render every other pixel in the bitmap.
It's not just that. It's also used to display more color shades using fewer number of colors. Simple example would be putting one red pixel next to a blue pixel, and repeating that - the resulting surface would look purple, especially if the pixels are really small.
 
OK, from that I can tell it is not dithering (I know it as "Solarisation"). So I just don't know. I could try to make some pictures but I think it's hard to get it on a picture. It seems that it has something to do with sharpness setting (maybe because of this it's more visible with progressive scan ON).
 
Isn't Dithering what EVERY PSP GAME suffers from? WE 2007 on the psp is insanely awesome, but that for another thread.
 
Thrakier said:
OK, from that I can tell it is not dithering (I know it as "Solarisation"). So I just don't know. I could try to make some pictures but I think it's hard to get it on a picture. It seems that it has something to do with sharpness setting (maybe because of this it's more visible with progressive scan ON).

Sharpness could be the culprit. Sharpness (and this is particularly evident if you're using an LCD screen,) is a setting that artifically 'enhances' the image. Not all sets do it well, and it's often said that the function is there mainly to make the display 'pop' on the shop floor.

In regular use, setting your sharpness too high can result in a thatched, halo, warping-like effect where lines are close together... you can also get convergence errors, where lines seem to get an edge of incorrect-colour to them. http://www.thx.com/home/dvd/optimizer/monitorPerf.html

Going off your description stating that this appears to be 'in' the background -- I would also look into the possibility that your cables may not be ideally shielded, and try turning off or unplugging any other devices.
 
6d0g2yu
 
radioheadrule83 said:
Sharpness could be the culprit. Sharpness (and this is particularly evident if you're using an LCD screen,) is a setting that artifically 'enhances' the image. Not all sets do it well, and it's often said that the function is there mainly to make the display 'pop' on the shop floor.

In regular use, setting your sharpness too high can result in a thatched, halo, warping-like effect where lines are close together... you can also get convergence errors, where lines seem to get an edge of incorrect-colour to them. http://www.thx.com/home/dvd/optimizer/monitorPerf.html

Going off your description stating that this appears to be 'in' the background -- I would also look into the possibility that your cables may not be ideally shielded, and try turning off or unplugging any other devices.

Sharpness is already set to 0, so it means that nothing is enhanced. Except with PS, because that is sharper.
 
Thrakier said:
Is this Dithering?
Try the game's hidden "HiDef-Mode" and tell us if the problem persists.

GodOfWar2 runs 512 horizontal by default, most TVs (Samsungs especially) handle this quite badly. In P-Scan the PS2 upscales to 640 by itself, but that's using bilinear filter which sucks for anything that isn't a power of two resize, so again, it will not look great on HDTV.
As a HDTV user, ideally you'd want to run this on a PS3.
 
It's almost like there is a grate in the background on some places, like some kind of a raster.
It's not always visible and it's much less visible or not visible at all with god of war 1 (which looks a lot cleaner @480p). I did not notice it with other PS2 Games I tested.
 
Thrakier said:
Sharpness is already set to 0, so it means that nothing is enhanced. Except with PS, because that is sharper.

Some people don't realize it, but on some TVs, setting sharpness to 0 artificially blurs the image. My Toshiba LCD TV is like that.
 
Thrakier said:
I'm playing God of War II and specially in Progressive Scan I can sometimes see horizontal or vertical lines (depends) almost like it's "in" the background. Hard to describe. It's not so noticeable with PS off. I have a Samsung 4065.

i dont know how this is called but this happens frames are sent wrong. This happens if the ps2 makes more frames then the output can handle and you get half of the frames. This is the reason why GoW2 has no Framerate drops.
 
tanod said:
Some people don't realize it, but on some TVs, setting sharpness to 0 artificially blurs the image. My Toshiba LCD TV is like that.

I had a Toshiba LCD and it didn't blur the picture @0, it startet to blur from -1 on or it enhanced from +1 on. I don't think that the Samsung blurs the picture @0. But this is always hard to tell...
 
Obaid said:
i dont know how this is called but this happens frames are sent wrong. This happens if the ps2 makes more frames then the output can handle and you get half of the frames. This is the reason why GoW2 has no Framerate drops.

No, you are talking about V-Snyc issues.
 
M3d10n said:
Impossible. The PS2 has no mipmapping support, let alone anisotropic filtering. It's probably artifacting due to the *lack* of minifying filtering.
Actually it has got mipmapping, as well as trilinear filtering. For various reasons (involving performance penalties and general pain in the arse) it hasn't been too commonly used.
 
Thrakier said:
I had a Toshiba LCD and it didn't blur the picture @0, it startet to blur from -1 on or it enhanced from +1 on. I don't think that the Samsung blurs the picture @0. But this is always hard to tell...

Mine goes from 0 to 100 and defaults at 50. 0 is blurry, 100 is a tiny bit artifact-y.
 
Some people just don't notice it then their picture is oversharpened. ;) For example compaore 360 VGA with 360 Component Standard Settings. VGA should have the "right" Sharpening.
 
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