Want 3D on your PS3? You’re stuck at 720p

Jacqueline DiOrio 21 Jul, 2010 at 6:51pm ET Article published in Gaming

Sony Online Entertainment confirmed this week that 3D titles can only be played on the PS3 at 720P. Anything at 1080p will be downscaled to 720p, and Sony is recommending that developers only create 720p 3D games in the future.

Sony is doing this in the name of preserving smooth framerates. While the PS3 is certainly capable of displaying 1080p images, it takes twice the performance to do so for a stereo-3D game, and hence 60fps cannot be guaranteed. Instead of letting customers see how the 1080p fares game by game, Sony is automatically limiting all games to 720p.

This move does not bode well for Sony, considering that the PS3 is only four years into its projected 10 year lifespan. Sony claims that, “the effects of this policy are probably unnoticeable to most gamers” and “even trained computer graphics artists could barely tell the difference between the resolutions”. Considering that some cannot tell the difference between 720p and 1080p without 3D, Sony may have a point, but given that the PS3 was billed as the “1080p console,” it’s disappointing.

It will be sometime yet before the performance of the PS3 and 3D games can be widely tested, as 3D has only just hit the market this year.

Comments

21 Jul 2010 ~ 7:23pm chrisWhite This makes sense, you're effectively asking them to render twice the number of images. Well, depending on how clever their shaders are for doing this it can be dramatically less but that something only really high-end film guys like Pixar (Renderman) are doing at this point, at least to the best of my knowledge.
22 Jul 2010 ~ 1:39am nokia9800 I don't now what is the problem with that, I think you have sensitivity with ps3 it is the only console device that is able to run 3D game and instead to be happy about that you stuck with this issue about the resolution and you have to know this is because HDMI 1.4 standard, I'm pretty sure if that for the Xbox360 you will not write such things.
22 Jul 2010 ~ 10:41am GnomeQueen That's actually not true, I prefer the PS3 over the Xbox 360!
22 Jul 2010 ~ 1:20pm Cliff_Forster I'm not sure how resolution will impact the 3D experience, but for the most part native 720P content scales well enough on most sets that you would struggle to tell the difference. HD is all pretty good, the average consumer won't notice the resolution difference, but chug his frame rate to 20, then it will become apparent that there is a problem. Its probably a pretty good trade off.
22 Jul 2010 ~ 1:24pm BD OH YEA MEDIA AT ITS BEST TELL ME BUD WHAT DO THE COMPETITORS HAVE? AND PLEASE NOTE THAT IT IS BILLED AS UP TO 1080P NOT FIXED AT 1080P. THIS HAS GOT TO BE ONE OF THE MOST PATHETIC COMPLAINTS I HAVE READ.
22 Jul 2010 ~ 1:26pm Ryder Pot, Kettle
22 Jul 2010 ~ 8:20pm Al There is no problem with 720p.

Because most of the retail games based in disc we play, are Native for 720p and upscaled for 1080p.
23 Jul 2010 ~ 4:17am online kids games I would rather they not be adventurous and mess things up.
23 Jul 2010 ~ 5:13am Obsidian The grand majority of good games on the PS3 already run at 720p or less. I just hope they won't have to compromise in areas other than the resolution to compensate for the increased workload of 3D. Killzone 3 looked promising visually.
26 Jul 2010 ~ 6:14am Froobnoobz 3d Gaming is crap imo, i got to play cod4/5 and bioshock 2 at a 3d gamig convention =), You get used to it so evntually it just becomes sameish, And in the long run it just muddles up your sight =/