With an article like this you not only annoy ps3 fan boys. When your journalistic skills go no further than draw a conclusion based on box art and later on defending it by referring to other websites it’s poor practice.

I just discovered your website, but after reading your article and the subsequent responses to users comments it seems that I have to lower my expectations regarding this websites content.

Ps I agree that x-box 360 has better multi platform games, I am looking forward to a properly conducted article highlighting facts and actual comparisons of multi platform games… or maybe not since I am convinced the xbox 360 will win hands down.

You are right in that my original post wasn’t clear, and for that I apologize. I still stand by my opinion of the game, regardless of what resolutions they are displaying in. I will have to disagree with your comment that I think everyone who disagrees with me is a fanboy. It’s simply not true. I think a logical person reading through the comments can see who the fanboys are and who the people are simply arguing their case. There’s a huge difference.

As for you, theEnemy, if you want me to stop being an attention whore then you should just stop giving me attention.

Stop being an attention-whore.

You’ve also claimed that all the people who disagree with you are ps3 fanboys, which isn’t true either: I don’t own a PS3, have no desire to own a PS3, believe that most multiplat games look better on 360 (burnout paradise the only possible exception, and even then you’d be hard pressed to notice the difference) and believe that the 360 has better exclusives (although I must admit I haven’t actually played that many ps3 exclusives, so I can’t really justify that belief). But all of that doesn’t change the fact the HANA chip in the 360 does EXACTLY the same thing as the scaler in a tv set, and as a few people have noted sometimes the scalers in their tv do a better job than the 360 scaler (as i said, i can’t tell the difference so i just let my 360 do it). The 360 is almost certainly the better multiplat console and with the possible exception of one or two games (uncharted, wipeout hD) the PS3 hasn’t really done anything to show itself as a graphically superior console, but all of that doesn’t change the fact they your original article was rubbish based around a total misunderstanding of what scaling is, what it does etc.

It would seem that the resolution is the only point of contention in an article discussing why the PS3 version is not as polished. Even if I am wrong about the resolutions, which majority rules that I am (even though I was just talking about the boxes, jeez), it doesn’t change the point of the article. In fact, people claiming the resolution is actually higher on the PS3 only hurts its case because you are basically saying that even at a higher resolution the PS3 version manages to look slightly worse.

It is totally irrelevant what the upscaled output is. The only thing of relevance is the native resolution.

My amplifier upscales to 1080p, so does my television and by all accounts these particular upscalers are superior to one in the Xbox 360. If I plug the PS3 into my computer monitor, I can upscale the output to 2560×1600. woohoo!

But it doesn’t matter. The native resolution that the game is rendered at is 720p. 720p displayed on a native 720p panel can actually look better than upscaled 720p on a 1080p panel. But all this is hypothetical; there are so many factors to consider with upscaling.

I just wish when people are in a position to post articles like this, they also did their research properly. Microsoft are just playing the marketing game one way, Sony the other. The experience for users is the same.

Moreover, upscaling merely means making the image bigger to fit your screen. Neither console is particularily good at smoothing or improving the image for the larger size, with the PS3/Xbox 360 only performing smoothing upscaling for DVD’s. Most TV’s upscale the input image themselves but Microsoft like to let consumers know if their TV is supported (all 1080p Tv’s support 720p/1080i/1080p anyway). Sony prefer to let consumers know the native resolution (except in the case of sub-HD resolutions. eg. Haze/GTAIV)

At the end of the day – there is no difference in the resolution of Far Cry 2 – there is no borking or gimping going on in the resolution. Both are 720p. It will only ever be rendering in 720p (or 1080i for PS3, recommended only for TVs that do not support 720p) – upscaling that image does not improve the rendering, only the size of the image. You will expereince no difference in the Xbox 360/PS3 upscaling to 1080p, than if the HDTV was left to upscale 720p itself. If there is any gimping, it would be in the slightly dodgy framerate on the PS3 version.

So the issue here would seem to be one of marketting. Microsoft would probably argue that they’re just trying to be helpful to the average layman consumer, in specifically telling them the game will display correctly on whatever HD tv they happen to have, and at whatever input standards it supports. Sony, on the other hand, would presumably say that they’re quoting the native resolution of the game, and that to do anything else, would be to misrepresent the game’s actual content.

I’m no fan of sony and their attitude to proprietary hardware/software platforms, but in this case, i favour their approach. MS are clearly hoping that some people will be mislead into buying the game on 360, on the mistaken basis that it runs at a higher resolution.

Either way, this whole article seems to be an unfair and unfounded criticism of the PS3. Both versions of the game run at the same native resolution (which far from being irrelevent as the article suggests, is really the only figure that matters) and both consoles will upscale the signal to 1080i/p. Their capability is the same, they just have different policies on box specs.

It’s like if Jordan was sick for a game a decade ago, and his stats really suffered, it could be considered an excuse, but it’s also a “reason”. I’ll admit many multiplats are superior in the visual area for 360, but there’s a “reason” for it, and it’s NOT okay. Burnout Paradise, COD 4, Dead Space and many others look great on both, and it’s hard to tell the difference, if at all. Obviously it’s up to the dev’s, because it’s pretty blatant that great visuals can happen on the PS3 (exclusives AND some multiplats prove this). You don’t blame the car for crashing when the guy next to you did fine in the same circumstances, it’s who was at the wheel.

God the PS3 is so shit.

if your running a game at ?640×480? on your PC with a 1920×1080 monitor (fullscreen), it’s being upscaled to 1080p. It doesn’t make it any prettier.

So if your blessed with a hd1080 tv, whatever your playing with will be upscaled.

And someone please explain how “minor irritation for some” = gimped?

I think the developers should be praise for trying to create an equal experience on all platforms.

Give me a break.

You’re welcome.

Sorry, but you’re full of it. Both the 360 and the PS3 can render at 1080P resolution. However, very few games on either platform do. Very, very few PS3 (and 360) games do. Got it?

That said, I have found that on my TV the 360 does a much better job scaling than the PS3. PS3 games always look a little blurry. So, whether it’s native or not, scaling can help an image look better (just as it does in upconverting DVD players) and the 360 does a better job of it.

People trying to pass off the idea that Microsoft is somehow deceiving people by listing all possible output resolutions are being really absurd. In fact, Sony (and other publishers)are making a big mistake by not listing all available output resolutions on the back of the box. Most people don’t go searching for such information on the internet, they basically just go off what information is on the back of the box. And if you have a 1080P HDTV, you are likely going to be looking to see if a game can output at that resolution.

Anyway, most of you are making a mountain out of a molehill. The fact is, most of Dan Landis’ comments about all the Sony hype with regard to the PS3 supposedly being the only true HD console and all that are true. Far Cry 2 does look and perform better on the 360 (as do most cross-platform titles) and it’s getting really old that so many people have bought into Sony’s hype about the PS3 supposedly being the most powerful console. In terms of 95% of game development out there, it is actually the 360 that is the more powerful.

As for “play both versions yourself and then decide” well, do you realize that I took that picture? I do have both versions of the game and I agree with the IGN head-to-head, with the exception of the PC version which I haven’t played. Of course, saying that doesn’t really matter, does it, since I’m such an obvious fanboy.

Everyone has some kind of bias, that’s inevitable. Most multiplatform games will likely not be identical to each other, that’s also inevitable. The bottom line is that there will almost always be an inferior version, no matter how minor, and in this case it seems to be the PS3. I honestly don’t see why people think that if someone says one thing is better, there must be some ulterior motive besides just logical comparison. I also find it ridiculous that our opinions apparently don’t matter since we are not IGN and we speak our minds instead of just spewing out political bullshit.

“Also, I wanted to talk about this resolution topic some more. 960×1080 is not widescreen. Even if it were true that this was the resolution of Far Cry 2 on PS3, I don’t see how stretching a non-widescreen resolution into a widescreen picture would actually be a benefit to the visuals”

The PS3 has a hardware scaler for the horizontal width, but not the height component of the picture. Wipeout HD uses this to good effect – if the frame rate was going to drop below 60, it drops the horizontal rez to 960 as the hardware chip will double it to 1920. Grab some frames from Wipeout and you can see some will be full 1920×1080, some will be 960X1080 with hardware width scaling. Its a clever method to keep the game at 60 hz in a 1080P rez.

Obviously the coders of Farcry 2 are well aware of the PS3 architecture and choose the res so that 1080P play can run at full frame rate with the the width doubled by the hardware scaler available.

Even someone with a rudimentary grasp of visuals will understand that having more rendered pixels on screen will give more detail, and there’s less ’stretching’ going on with a 960×1080P signal than there is blowing up a 720P signal.

As for your maturity level,its obviously pre-teen humor and no doubt you think you are witty? I think most people can see straight through it to a kind of ‘teen angst’ that shows through and belies your basic insecurity. You know you’ve written garbage, but you’ve gone to far to climb down now.

Incidentally – I’m a happy 360 owner and a game developer by trade. I’ve got no ‘drum to bang’ except for wanting a reasonable standard of journalism. It’s bad enough we have this kind of trash written on forums all over the web, but I really do take offense when I see such misleading tripe masquerading as journalism peddled on a site that formally had reasonable content.

I can imagine him writing every day:
“Dear sir,I’ve noticed you are a substandard human being”.”Dear sir,I’ve noticed your horoscope does not fit me”.”Dear sir,I’ve got nothing better to do today”
Glad you are out,its more than a hundred comments already.STFU.

Watching fanboys – from both sides – get worked up about stuff that either

a) comes from the back of a ****ing box or

b) is based off something so hard to spot it requires the expert help of a trained eye

is always sad and amusing at the same time… tragically comic, comically tragic. Like you said, a number of fine looking games have come out this generation running sub-hd native and it more-or-less goes by unnoticed: it takes the work of experts like Quaz51 to bring this to people’s attention. I’ve got a lot of respect for people like quaz51 who spot little details which whilst being fundamentally unimportant are still interesting from a tech/development perspective (nobody would’ve noticed the dynamic res buffer on wipeoutHD without people like quaz51, and that stuff is fucking cool – why don’t more games do that?!?), but unfortunately their interesting finds often get turned into retard flamebait.

And, relatedly, I agree completely that this article is mere flamebait – an article based on information taken from the back of the box? C’mon, that’s pathetic by anyone’s standards.

@dan landis: like i said: that’s pathetic by anyone’s standards. And your desperate po-mo inverse self deprecating jokes in the thread are just making it worse. this was a bullshit article to begin with. seriously, if you want to do a comparison then buy both versions, sit down with them, play them both, see how it turns out. What you have here is utter rubbish.

You can’t learn from your mistakes and now you have lost the last shred of respect you had. You must have been boiling all morning over this matter. Were you to have joked at the beginning of this fiasco and and said ‘we goofed’ all would have been forgiven. But you have continued to shovel away. Can you even see the top of the hole above you anymore?

w While 960×1080 isn’t wide screen it is in a higher native resolution than the 360 version. Which takes us back to the gist of your original article. It mentioned nothing about any of the issues IGN had seen but rather was about the fact the 360 ran in a higher resolution. It also made a sharp point of how the devs were devoid of any responsibility in not properly engineering the PS3 version. Yet this is something which even your boss clearly indicated was in other PS3 titles and therefore a mystery here.

Let me break that down. Despite your snide remark about PS3 owners, this was indeed the devs fault. Of course that didn’t suit your PS3 is gimped article and thus isn’t mentioned. Truth in journalism, eh?

I think my work and the work of several other good posters is done here. Not to champion the PS3 but rather to point out the incompetence with which the original article was researched and the bitter hatred against the PS3 with which is was written. Not to mention the vitriol and adolescence with which the erred writing was defended.

Congratulations. In one night of stubbornness you single handedly, well with a little help from Chad, have managed to destroy this site’s reputation for neutrality and independence. Ripten’s days are over. I’m out.

I’m sorry my immaturity has been running rampant on this story. This is all because my professional writing fedora with laminated Press card is at the cleaners. Whoops.

Also, I wanted to talk about this resolution topic some more. 960×1080 is not widescreen. Even if it were true that this was the resolution of Far Cry 2 on PS3, I don’t see how stretching a non-widescreen resolution into a widescreen picture would actually be a benefit to the visuals, even given the extra number of pixels. Possibly this is what gives some games a “blur” effect, and this is probably what lead IGN to declare 360’s visuals as slightly superior to PS3’s. Just because a game has a higher resolution does not necessarily mean it has a better picture.

I find it kinda funny that everyone is clinging to this resolution deal and ignoring the other issues that the PS3 version is having. Even if I was wrong about the resolutions (which I’m not yet convinced that I was), the rest of the article still does enough to make me think the PS3 version might be gimped, and that is the whole point.

Though I admire Chad for taking the time to write responses, he singularly seems to miss the point about this ‘work’. Opinion pieces are fine and we all have to accept that not everyone agrees with them. Presenting misinformation as fact, is not fine and indefensible, and Chad has clearly evaded taking any responsibility for presenting the truth. As for the author – his earlier responses have show the maturity level he operates at,if the article didn’t have you convinced of that in the first place.