Would a PS3 play games at 1080i on my old CRT "HD" TV?

[gtsing]

I have a CRT TV that says it supports 1080i. It doesn't have any HDMI or anything. I know the PS3 can support 1080i but I think I heard that was just for the main menu screen or something and games wouldn't actually play at 1080i. Has a recent firmware update fixed this? Or, is there anyone that has a CRT HD TV such as mine that could comment on this? Thanks. I don't really want to get a PS3 to discover I can only play games at 480p. 🙁

 

[darkswordsman17]

I don't own a PS3 myself, but I'm fairly certain you can set it to output 1080i for most everything. I believe there was an issue where some of the early games would not scale to 1080i, and there was quite a bit of people who weren't happy about it, and so it was fixed with an update. Since then, I'm also fairly sure that there have been other updates addressing scaling and output, so by now, I think it should be pretty good overall. The only thing that probably won't do 1080i is DVDs but thats because you don't have HDMI.

One of the things that I was happy about on my TV is that it does support 720p/1080i and basically everything other than 1080p. There were quite a few CRTs that would only do 1080i/480p (where they would actually convert it to 540p). I found out that mine even has 800 lines of vertical resolution. I haven't done any real testing, but it does seem to me that 1080i does show more detail on it (based on the football games I've watched), although I can't be certain, as I haven't done an apples to apples comparison yet. I'm waiting for the HDMI cable I got from monoprice to test that with the 360 that I have. I'm curious if I'll see much difference between HDMI and component, and subsuquently 720p/1080i.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Does your CRT accept a 720p signal? The PS3 will do that, and it's probably what the real resolution of the CRT is anyway (accepts 1080i but downscales it).

I think 1080i was fixed ages ago, but my TV is 1080p so I haven't had reason to check it myself.

 

[ponyo]

If I had component cables I would test it for you. I've an old Sony projection TV with no HDMI that supports 1080i through component I could test on.

 

[mlm]

Of course it can. I have a CRT HDTV that doesn't even accept 720p properly (sometimes the screen jumps), but the PS3 plays just fine.

 

[gtsing]

Nope. My TV doesn't support 720p. But, by the looks of things, a PS3 would play games fine at 1080i.

 

[MrPickins]

It will play games at 1080i no problem, but games that only support 720p will be downgraded to 480(I cant tell if it's I or P).

My friends older HDTV is the same way.

 

[gtsing]

Oh OK. Thanks. So basically all games that support 1080i will play at 1080i. If not, they scale down to 480p. Gotcha.

 

[CKDragon]

Originally posted by: gtsing
Oh OK. Thanks. So basically all games that support 1080i will play at 1080i. If not, they scale down to 480p. Gotcha.

This is just speculation, but: The good news is that every developer is aware of this issue and will likely make their game (or at least any game worth having) 1080i compatible because of this. It was an issue almost immediately at launch, so titles from the beginning of '07 on should be fine.

EDIT: Also, a PS3 owner would have to correct me, but have there been instances of patching games that previously had this problem?

 

[mlm]

Originally posted by: CKDragon
EDIT: Also, a PS3 owner would have to correct me, but have there been instances of patching games that previously had this problem?

AFAIK, not yet.

Virtua Tennis was the first game to support 1080i/p upscaling. I believe most games since then have supported it through upscaling, if not natively.

 

[jiffylube1024]

I'm pretty sure that the PS3 does now support 1080i no problem, by a firmware update that came out earlier in the year.

 

[kylebisme]

Nope, quite a few games are 720p max, and if you can't run 720p you are stuck with the game rendering at 480p.

 

[MrPickins]

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
Nope, quite a few games are 720p max, and if you can't run 720p you are stuck with the game rendering at 480p.

QFT

The newest Tiger Woods is that way, and the damn thing just came out.

For the love of god, put those idle SPE's to use upscaling! Isn't that one thing they excel at? 😕

 

[bcoupland]

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion behind this issue. First of all, let me start by saying that almost all HD CRTs have a native resolution of 1080i, and scale everything to that. There were a handful of high-end RPCRTs that actually had the scanning rate and video bandwidth to handle native 720p, and they were phased out quickly due to cost. The issue with the PS3 isn't that it can't upscale 720p games to 1080i, it's that it must be enabled by the developer in order to do this. Because of the lack of a hardware scaler (other than the mickey-mouse horizontal scaler) on the PS3, a developer must use Cell to upscale 720p games. This means that on games that don't support it, 1080i scaling cannot be patched in, because the processing rescources are already being used.

 

[MrPickins]

Originally posted by: bcoupland
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion behind this issue. First of all, let me start by saying that almost all HD CRTs have a native resolution of 1080i, and scale everything to that. There were a handful of high-end RPCRTs that actually had the scanning rate and video bandwidth to handle native 720p, and they were phased out quickly due to cost. The issue with the PS3 isn't that it can't upscale 720p games to 1080i, it's that it must be enabled by the developer in order to do this. Because of the lack of a hardware scaler (other than the mickey-mouse horizontal scaler) on the PS3, a developer must use Cell to upscale 720p games. This means that on games that don't support it, 1080i scaling cannot be patched in, because the processing rescources are already being used.

I seriously doubt all the SPE units are being utilized.

It should be trivial to provide upscaling. Developers are just too rushed and/or lazy.