MS Engineer on PS3: Horizontal scaling? Unimpressive.

Earlier this week, Sony released an SDK update which was supposed to fix issues regarding the scaling of 480i PS2 games that run on backwards compatibility mode on the PS3. Later on, there was another SDK update which allowed PS3 games to scale their content, albeit only horizontally.

Though many PS3 owners have welcomed these new developments, there are some who still think that maybe these aren’t really as important or as impressive as others may actually think. Among those who remain unimpressed would be Bruce Dawson, a senior software design engineer for Microsoft.

Asked about his thoughts on the PS3’s latest scaling solutions, he notes that horizontal scaling is “a poor substitute for a true hardware scaler”, and that this is actually a relatively easy thing to do. He also points out that Sony’s “new” feature is something that consoles have always been able to handle, and that it all “just sounds like they are adjusting the video output rate”. All in all, he basically says that the updates are “nowhere near as good as the Xbox 360’s scaler“.

Now, we’re no engineers, so some of the tech-talk is a bit dizzying for mere mortals like us. However, for those of you who ARE engineers and want to know more of the nitty-gritty details, then just click on the “Full Article” link below for the full version of Dawson’s impressions.

Earlier this week, Sony released an SDK update which was supposed to fix issues regarding the scaling of 480i PS2 games that run on backwards compatibility mode on the PS3. Later on, there was another SDK update which allowed PS3 games to scale their content, albeit only horizontally.

Though many PS3 owners have welcomed these new developments, there are some who still think that maybe these aren’t really as important or as impressive as others may actually think. Among those who remain unimpressed would be Bruce Dawson, a senior software design engineer for Microsoft.

Asked about his thoughts on the PS3’s latest scaling solutions, he notes that horizontal scaling is “a poor substitute for a true hardware scaler”, and that this is actually a relatively easy thing to do. He also points out that Sony’s “new” feature is something that consoles have always been able to handle, and that it all “just sounds like they are adjusting the video output rate”. All in all, he basically says that the updates are “nowhere near as good as the Xbox 360’s scaler“.

Now, we’re no engineers, so some of the tech-talk is a bit dizzying for mere mortals like us. However, for those of you who ARE engineers and want to know more of the nitty-gritty details, here’s the full version of Dawson’s impressions.

I see no sign that the PS3 contains a chip that can do vertical scaling, and this new feature (horizontal scaling) is a poor substitute for a true hardware scaler. It is a step forward for owners of 1080i only HDTVs, once PS3 games support it, but it is nowhere near as good as the Xbox 360Â’s scaler.

This recent announcement is just for horizontal scaling, and horizontal scaling is easy. To do high quality horizontal scaling you just need to buffer up a few pixels and intelligently average between them.

Cheap horizontal scaling is even easier: you just send pixels to the video output a bit slower (or send pixels at the same rate, but read them from memory slower). ItÂ’s the sort of thing that consoles have always been able to do. This new horizontal scaling feature just sounds like they are adjusting the video output rate.

Vertical scaling, on the other hand, is much harder. You need to be able to buffer up (or sample from) two or more lines of data, and then intelligently average between them. For high quality scaling you want to be sampling from a half-dozen lines or more. The Xbox 360 can do this. I donÂ’t know whether the PS3 can do this, but if it could I think we would have seen it by now.

This new feature means that games that have previously only supported 720p can now, sort of, be modified to support 1080. When these games detect a display that canÂ’t support 720p they can switch to using a 960×1080 buffer. This is only 12.5% more pixels than 1280×720 so the increase in fill rate and memory consumption should be manageable. Then they can tell the PS3 to stretch this buffer to 1920×1080 at display time and voila, 1080 support.

Except, it will be pretty weak 1080 support with an odd and substandard result. The horizontal resolution will be worse than with 720p (960 across instead of 1280), and the images will be twice as blurry horizontally as vertically. 960×1080 is going to look worse than 1280×720 (although itÂ’s certainly an improvement over having to drop back to 480i).