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Xbox One's Scaler May Be Applying a Sharpening Filter to All Sub-1080p Games

I'm glad I found this thread. I had noticed this on my Sammy plasma earlier, but I couldn't figure out what was happening.

I'm going to move this system to the LED in the loft space to see if I can pick out some more differences.

By the way, all my sets are calibrated professionally by a friend who has cedia certification (with the crazy expensive equipment to boot).
 

Raist

Banned
they probably had their settings wrong. I turned on full rgb.. that gave me crushed blacks so I set it back to limited and 24 bit.

No. DF uses capture gear which takes full RGB in. Your TV likely doesn't support it, or you didn't switch it on. Hence the crushed blacks.

DF's problem comes from something else, which is definitely not their "oh well we're told the full RGB option was bugged" answer (makes no sense), but might be explained by Blim's FM5 screen.
 

pixlexic

Banned
No. DF uses capture gear which takes full RGB in. Your TV likely doesn't support it, or you didn't switch it on. Hence the crushed blacks.

DF's problem comes from something else, which is definitely not their "oh well we're told the full RGB option was bugged" answer (makes no sense), but might be explained by Blim's FM5 screen.


nope my sony bravia clearly states it uses full rgb.. it works well on ps3 and xbox.. maybe xbones full rgb and deep color is screwed up?

plus this is not the first time DF has screwed up their settings.
 
I wonder if MS will address this issue or if any of the outlets plan on picking up the story? I'd be willing to write about it if someone is willing to give me a crash course about visual fidelity. It's a little out of my wheelhouse.
 

Raist

Banned
nope my sony bravia clearly states it uses full rgb.. it works well on ps3 and xbox.. maybe xbones full rgb and deep color is screwed up?

That's what I think. Well Limited seems to be fucked as well. But one thing is for sure, its full RGB range in not messed up in a "actually outputs limited" way as DF said.

It looks like both ranges are "shifted" towards black, which would explain why DF's captures had crushed blacks. i.e it's a HW-related problem, not a bad setting on anyone's part.
 
I don`t have an xbox one, but i saw Dead Rising 3 and Ryse on my friends machine, and i agree, Dead Rising 3 looks overly sharp, very grainy, too dark and just unnatural - really didn`t like the look of the image quality.

Ryse on the other hand didn`t have this problem. Image quality looked great and way more natural and balanced.

TV was a perfectly calibrated Pana VT 55. My friend is an image quality nerd and spent lot of time to get the most out of his equipment.
 
set it to 720p in ghosts and it's way WAY better, i guess DR3 will be the same

just watched the high bit rate video of Ryse Digital Foundry put up on my TV. no artificial sharpening to be seen. I'll try to track down some Killer Instinct and Powerstar Golf direct captures or high bitrate footage to check.

COD (720p), BF4 (720p) and DR3 (720p) all definitely have it though.

I am again amazed at how 'soft' 900p looks to me compared to 1080p native. Not that Ryse looks bad or anything.
 
Oh god. Watching movies when people have cranked the MotionFlow, Movie-Plus, 40000Hz ultragarbage set to 10 makes me mad as hell.

This stuff sometimes, sometimes benefits things like live sports matches. But otherwise, that shit needs to go.

The worst part is that when I told him it looked like shit, he responded with "No, you just need to get with the times, movie-plus is the future. Just look at The Hobbit man".

I haven't ventured into his apartment since, as I know I will probably get a stroke.
 
From lagom's LCD calibration test page for sharpness. If you squint your eyes it the boxes should blend together. The circle will blend if gamma settings are correct. If it is correct then 0 sharpness on my monitor means blur filter.

pay attention to the white and black boxes in the circle also. if any sharpening is occurring you will see a halo around them, where the grey is either darker or lighter in the near vicinity to the boxes. it will be darker around the white box and lighter around the black box. to really be sure it's happening, you might want to cover up the boxes with a piece of card, to eliminate any optical illusions happening.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
But it's such sharp

1920x-2.jpg~original


wow

many pixels
I told the reps at the Area One event that the sharpness on their TVs was way too high. Looks like they've been vindicated.
 

Reallink

Member
Did you turn on the cloud? I heard it makes things look 4 times better.

Seriously, the oversharpening and forcing a darker color palette (by sacrificing quality with the crushed blacks) was a conscious decision by MS to fool the uninformed mass market crowd into believing games look more vibrant on the Xbone.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but minus the sharpening, the 360 did the same thing. MS intentionally fucked the gamma (likely the same thing they're doing on the One) to force a crushed saturated look. I'm pretty sure there exists an interview or one-off where they say it focus tested better on a user's "average" (shitty Walmart bargain bin) TV which tend toward a lower gamma response in the low-IRE (washed out dark/shadow details). So in effect, MS are attempting to correct for shitty displays by ruining quality displays in the process. They do include correction tables, which I've seen detailed in UE3, CE3, or IDTech5 developer materials, but they don't appear to work very well as output never seems to match PC or PS3 versions.
 

chubigans

y'all should be ashamed
The weirdest thing about this filter is that it gives off a look that reminds me of off-camera footage. I dunno who thought this would be a good idea at all.

mciziGb.png
 
The weirdest thing about this filter is that it gives off a look that reminds me of off-camera footage. I dunno who thought this would be a good idea at all.

mciziGb.png

during the Giant bombcast, i always got that impression when certain games were onscreen, especially killer instinct
 

Teletraan1

Banned
Sharpness settings on any TV should always, always be set to 0.

Some TVs "0" is not exactly zero on the slider and setting it to 0 will result in a soft image. Best thing to do is look it up on the internet and find out what value your 0 is or use your eyes lol. I have seen 0, 30, 50 be true 0.
 

Teletraan1

Banned
Your expecting the same kind of publications that can barely tell the difference between 1080p and 720p to pick up on this? My advice, stick to GAF for this kind of IQ and tech break down or deconstruction. We are ahead of the media curve 95% of the time. Based on screens alone, I can see that COD Ghosts, BF4 and DR3 add this awful sharpening filter. So what the OP says regarding sub Full HD feeds having sharpening applied, makes sense. Perhaps it only does it with 720p games, because I haven't seen the issue in AC BF or Ryse, and both of those games are 900p.

This exactly. Plus we can give you discounts on chemical weapons. /s
ess

sorry for dp
 

Kelegacy

XBOX - RECORD ME LOVING DOWN MY WOMAN GOOD
The weirdest thing about this filter is that it gives off a look that reminds me of off-camera footage. I dunno who thought this would be a good idea at all.

That's exactly what it looks like. Good comparison.
 

Teddified

Member
So their solution to not being 1080p is to force 1080p and make it look worse then having it just set to 720p automaticly? Jeez.
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
So their solution to not being 1080p is to force 1080p and make it look worse then having it just set to 720p automaticly? Jeez.

I'm guessing this is their logic.

"720p at 1080p is blurry.

If we can't do native 1080p, then we wanna combat the downsides of 720p scaled to 1080p - namely blurriness.

The opposite of blurry is sharp.

Lets turn that sharp up approximately hella.

It basically looks the same."
 
This is the culmination of all of the debates we've been having over the past year or so.

The lower power GPU in the Xbox One has been discussed to the moon and back, and now that the games are available, we can see the way that MS has chosen to approach this issue is by sharpening the image to simulate a higher pixel count.

At least we were right to worry that there would be differences, as there clearly are. This same effect is visible in COD, BF, Dead Rising. It's pretty much universal in sub-1080p games. I don't think it was the right choice on their part.
 

Durante

Member
A sharpening filter is far worse than not being 1080p.
Actually, the combination of non-native and a sharpening filter is the absolute worst of all worlds. You end up with upscaled, oversharpened aliasing artifacts and line crawl. It's disgusting. How anyone could have thought that would be a good idea is beyond me.
 

bombshell

Member
Yes, that's actually how it looks natively.

Resolution matters, bro. Artificially sharpening it does only degrade the image quality.

Use this test pattern on your TV to calibrate sharpness.

I don't have any of the new consoles yet, but this thread is new ground for me lol

Sorry for noob question, but what should the goal for me be if I calibrate my tv sharpness using this image?

There's no guide description like on the color calibration picture further down from your post.
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
Of all the ridiculous decisions behind the XB1, this is probably the most puzzling one. They hardwired an effect that can so easily be enabled on every single TV in existence, if people want to enable it. Now everyone who finds this type of thing ghastly can't disable it. Moreover, it's an effect that's enabled by default on most TVs, so the picture output will be double-sharpened for everyone who didn't disable this on their TV.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Here we go, Killer Instinct. Enjoy sharpening in all its glory.

Here's native 720p output where you can see that sharpness is NOT introduced into the image:

vB0.png


Here's 1080p output from Xbox One scaled to 720p for comparison:

wB0.png


Here's the original 1080p shot from Xbox One:

xB0.png


So, for 720p games, it seems like best image quality is obtained by setting the console to 720p. This is the same for each 720p game that I've tried.

Ryse, on the other hand, suffers from no such thing.
 
Hold on just a second. Yesterday when I played Ghosts the text in the menus was very over sharpened. Today it looks fine. When going into/out of the game by "going home" I can briefly see the same thing I did yesterday with the super-sharp text, probably a result of the re-sizing going on.

Am I on drugs or something?



EDIT: I had forgot to set it back to 1080p after trying 720p. Sorry.....Turned it back to 1080p and it looks like shit again.
 

Majanew

Banned
KI is jaggy as fuck and has some lovely black crush going on.

If Xbox One is going to have a lot of 720p games, they really need to stop sharpening the image.
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
How do you change the resolution for a game? How do you stop the upscaling?

If you change the resolution in the settings then the console won't scale it but most likely your TV will scale it.

The difference is that your TV's scaling likely does not add a sharpening filter.

Here we go, Killer Instinct. Enjoy sharpening in all its glory.

Here's native 720p output where you can see that sharpness is NOT introduced into the image:

http://i.picpar.com/vB0.png[img]

Here's 1080p output from Xbox One scaled to 720p for comparison:

[img]http://i.picpar.com/wB0.png[img]

Here's the original 1080p shot from Xbox One:

[img]http://i.picpar.com/xB0.png[img]

So, for 720p games, it seems like best image quality is obtained by setting the console to 720p. This is the same for each 720p game that I've tried.

Ryse, on the other hand, suffers from no such thing.[/QUOTE]

I think a better comparison might be the 720p scaled to 1080p with Xbox Ones sharpening filter, compared to virgin 720p scaled up to 1080p similarly to how your TV would do it.

Xbox One with sharpening scaling

[img]http://i.picpar.com/xB0.png

Normal scaling

lQrAXAe.png
 

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
madmackem said:
Forza is native so you wont see the scaler in action.
From what I recall, 360 scaler was quite flexible, a choice of multiple filters, control over the number of samples etc. so it seems rather odd that they'd hard-wire something like this into new console.
What I'm getting at is that sharpen "filter" is just modifying the input-matrix for eg. a box-filter, so all that you'd need to achieve the effect(or remove it) with standard filter would be some control over the values in the matrix (not even algorithm choice).

It's possible MS chose that as default and most dev hadn't bothered to test out the options - but I highly doubt it's a fixed option.
 
I hate this, I fixed the colour balance/sharpness/brightness&contrast on my girlfriends dads television using a variety of tools to get is as close to reference levels as possible and he flipped a brick about it looking bad. I set the tv to torch mode again and he thanked me for restoring his pristine picture quality with every person on tv looking like a guido in orange spray tan, so yeah .

It's so weird, but I can totally understand how 'uninformed' people can think the way they do.
Darker darks, brighter white, 'cooler' tones are WOWing to the eyes; they think the darker/brighter/more saturated the picture is, the better the set - for untrained eyes, these things are instantly gratifying. Unfortunately, they're straight out wrong.

After a couple of hours watching a calibrated set, it's easy to see that it's insanely amounts better than an uncalibrated set, but it's the 'instant gratification' that sends a message to the brain saying 'THE OTHER ONE IS MORE BLACK', 'THESE SHADOWS ARE GREY!' etc. Difficult to explain, easier to just tell the g/f to shut up & you're right ;)
 

chubigans

y'all should be ashamed
God damn just started playing AC4 and I can't unsee this now. They better patch it out because it makes games look garbage.

Can you record some video and throw it on Skydrive? I don't think we've seen any actual pics of the XB1 version of Assassin's Creed.
 
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