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Warner Addresses Arkham City PC Issues – Says DX 11 Patch Is Coming

Dave Oshry — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:00:34 +0000

Even after being delayed, Arkham City is having PC issues. The game is currently having a plethora of performance problems when run in DX11 mode, and Warner has recommended you run it in DX9 mode until they fix the issues. Fucking fantastic.

Here’s what WB posted on their forums:

We have received reports of performance issues from players of Batman: Arkham City on PC. After researching the matter, we found that running the game with DX 11 is causing the performance issues. We’re working on a title update to address this matter and expect to make it available in the near future.

In the meantime, a workaround for this issue is to run the game with DX 9 instead of DX 11. Instructions on how to turn off DX 11 are listed below.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience with your gameplay experience and thank you all for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.

Instructions for changing DX 11 to DX 9
The Launcher can be accessed on Games for Windows LIVE and Steam to change DX 11 to DX 9 in the Settings menu.
Change both DirectX 11 Features and DirectX 11 Tessellation to OFF.

Games for Windows LIVE
Start > All Programs > Games > Right click on Batman: Arkham City and select Launcher > Settings

Open the Start Menu

Select All Programs and then the Games folder

Right click on Batman: Arkham City and select Launcher

Choose Settings then click on the arrow next to DX options to change

Steam:
Launch Steam Client > Library > Right click on Batman: Arkham City > Configure PC Options

Open Steam

Select Library

Right click on Batman: Arkham City and select Configure PC Options

Choose Settings then click on the arrow next to DX options to change

And now we play the waiting game…

Stay tuned to RipTen for continued coverage of Arkham City PC woes and hopefully some coverage of Arkham City on PC in 3D with DX11 ENABLED… when we actually can.

/sigh

Nvidia Working on Portal 2 3D Vision Patch to Address Known Issues

Bryce Wilson — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:01:08 +0000

With the highly anticipated launch of Portal 2 occurring earlier this week that has garnered incredibly high reviews the web over, some PC gamers with high end systems have been experiencing some issues while playing in 3D.

Well, Nvidia is aware of these issues and has fixes in the works, so worry not my high end PC brethren. If you’re not experiencing these problems, well then GOOD FOR YOU:

· Minor artifacts on water throughout the game.

· At the beginning of Chapter 8 (The Itch), the main NPC uses Video screens to watch and talk with you. In one eye the image is incorrect; half of the NPC is solid black like a bad shadow or texture.

· Using NVIDIA SLI with all in-game quality settings set to max, there is some image corruption. For example, objects will only render in one eye, polygons may appear stretched and shadows may be bad. You can work around this by configuring the antialiasing to any setting below 16x and setting anisotropic below 16x.

New 3DVision drivers should be available in a week or two. Until then, just squint really hard, it’s pretty much the same effect.

So yeah, for all 0.00018% of the people experiencing these issues… a fix is coming.

Don’t have a high end GPU but you’re reading this anyway? Check out our review of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590. You can’t afford it, but it sure is sexy. Sort of like that girl you met the other day. Haiyooooo.

CoD: Black Ops Patch 1.05 is Live – What it Fixed

Garrett Hartman — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:18:40 +0000

Patch 1.04 may have been a big disaster for PS3 gamers but Treyarch hasn’t given up yet. CoD: Black Ops Patch 1.05 will address many of these issues.

Treyarch Community Manager Josh Olin has stated in the Call of Duty forums that patch 1.05 is one of many that will be coming over the next few weeks to address problems with connecting to multiplayer matches.

**Update: Read this story about People still having problems**

These are the changes brought by patch 1.05:

Improved party reliability when leaving with party – an additional step in an ongoing series of party improvements continued in the next patch
Improved UPnP functionality – further expands the game’s capability to open NATs on routers with universal plug and play enabled
Enabled mute functionality in Playercards in the pre-game lobby
Enabled kick functionality in party and private match lobbies
Addressed an issue where the pre-game lobby would not always display properly when multiple players leave the lobby after a team split
Addressed an issue where the pre-game lobby would appear stuck on the countdown timer while waiting to balance teams

This is what Teyarch is addressing in future patches:

Addressing a freeze that would occur in rare situations involving a combination of high player counts and many killstreaks / explosions occurring simultaneously in a concentrated area
Further improvements to party reliability to address an issue where mixed NAT types connecting and disconnecting can cause players to drop in some situations
Investigating “infinite loading screen” issue reported by some users

PS3 users, got my fingers and toes crossed for you.

Veteran PS3 CoD Players Speak Out About Black Ops and Patch 1.04

Garrett Hartman — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:32:43 +0000

Everyone knows what a disaster Call of Duty Black Ops has been for PS3 owners. From an inferior port, to being on the short end of timed exclusive DLC, and now the infamous Patch 1.04. Our readers responded to our most recent Black Ops stories with such vigor, emotion, and wanted their voices heard.

At RipTen we agreed to give them a voice. Listen to 3 of our readers and veteran Black Ops players as they express their feelings of betrayal and disappointment. Two of our submitters asked that their real names not be used.

Read our previous Black Ops Stories about the 1.04 patch: Patch headaches for PS3 Owners and Possible fix for the Patch.

Tony Stark:

Well first of all, after forking over 64 bucks for a game I would expect it to work as advertised, I mean it is 2010 and we have put a man on the moon but I guess programming a game for a system that has been out almost four years is quite hard. What are we on? the 7th Call of Duty game now and almost every game released to date has had problems to start such as lag, glitches, cheats etc. I mean after COD4, W@W, and MW2 don’t you think when designing the game that past problems would be addressed first? Obviously not because Black Ops has these problems too. With the resources and money that these gaming companies have I would think it should be pretty easy to address the past problems and implement fixes for future titles, but rolling around in money is a lot more fun. Anyway, after standing in line for Black Ops at the midnight release with much anticipation to play this game with little known problems, which was advertised – I wasn’t disappointed at first. However, the same old problems soon began: connection issues, lag, lag and did I mention lag? Host migration failing and more lag I thought, “Great another copy and paste port for the PS3. But weren’t we told it wasn’t a port?” Josh Olin said there was a dedicated PS3 team! A team of what? Homeless guys you hired off the street? So I shelved the game for a while and waited for a fix, which was in the form of patch 1.04 that was supposed to be this holy savior…Well that holy savior for most has ended up being the devil in the flesh. I downloaded the patch last night thinking, “Finally lets go kill some noobs!”, but to my disappointment the first 3 games I spawned into I didn’t even have a gun…Yeah seriously I spawned bare handed no gun, no knife melee just my fists…Needless to say it didn’t work our very well. So off to the forums I went to see I wasn’t the only one having problems. The only comments I saw from developers were, “Its your connection, its your nat, its your router etc…” Well if that was the case then why do other games work? By the way my PS3 is in the DMZ so its not my connection. So after 2 hard resets of my PS3 due to freezing I decided to shelve the game again. But I wanted to play damn it, so I decided to start thinking like a homeless guy hired to code a video game for the PS3, and for the record I know nothing about programming or code etc. I do have some knowledge and decided to check the game save data and game data utility which on my PS3 was reversed. Let me explain that a little, the online portion of the game that allows you to play online was placed in the wrong folder of my PS3. So what was happening online is there was no info for the servers to link me up with other players for gaming. So with my great knowledge and expertise I decided to delete both files and download again. And low and behold the devil in the flesh disappeared and off to pawn noobs I was. At least for now until the next set of problems. But lets hope not! In my opinion the game play and balance of Black Ops is great . . . but you have to be able to play it first. End rant!

Jayson G:

Treyarch and Activision came out with a version update for COD Black Ops yesterday that I think it was more like a “downdate”. The Black Ops online game play on PS3 was already flakey enough and now they went ahead and pushed it completely over the edge. The online game play is so sporadic now you can barely even get into a game. Once you get into a game many people are complaining that they can’t even stay in the game for more than two minutes. What are these folks over at Treyarch and Activision doing? Everyone knows that Playstation network is a few steps below being awful and these clowns decide to release this patch and it seems like there was no testing or trial period involved because of the abundance of issues stemming from the “downdate”. I think I would even go as far to say PS3 online users are being ripped off because of all the times they are booted out of games before the end or host migration ends the game all because the devs want to release faulty patches and Playstation won’t host the damn games themselves!!

Randy Urias:

After three weeks of nonstop Black Ops, my brother would answer his cell phone as “Sir Pwnster”. Needless to say, the blockbuster release of Call Of Duty: Black Ops was a huge success. The game became the single greatest entertainment release of all time, raking in over $360 million in sales the first day. It’s ridiculously addictive multiplayer mode were so fun, my brother and I overlooked the constant connection problems and other glitches all PS3 owners were experiencing since launch day. The honeymoon was over on December 14^th however, when Treyarch released patch 1.04 to cure all connection problems plaguing the game.

Patch 1.04, as all PS3 players know, made the multiplayer modes completely unplayable for over 24 hours. Everything has hiccups, issues, kinks to be worked out, it is understandable. So like many other PS3 Black Ops players, I turned to an internet search to find a solution to the problem, so that I could continue playing my new addiction. What I found came as a surprise, seeing search results for petitions against Activision and Treyarch, demands for refunds, and a general firestorm of very angry gamers. I too was angry about the horrible connection problems that made the game very frustrating to play, but I also found out that I was being ripped off.

Xbox360 owners have a host of features with their copy of Black Ops that I don’t have on the PS3. Playing split-screen online, your buddy can log in to his own account to level-up alongside you on the same system, while PS3 players just play the session as a temporary user. The 360 version also has significantly less connection issues than the PS3 version, not to say they are nonexistent, but they are definitely less, to the point where Xbox owners are NOT signing online petitions for a refund. Xbox players also could run their game directly from the multiplayer screen when they launch the game, something that PS3 owners can only do once they download the 1.04 patch. Why couldn’t Treyarch launch the game with this simple feature like they did with the Xbox version? Why can’t I gain experience when I play online with my brother?

The bottom line is that PS3 owners paid the same $60 dollars for what was supposed to be the same game on Xbox. Activision may have some kind of deal with Microsoft, promising exclusive content and extra features for their version, but if that is the case then consumers should know about it before we spend money on something that isn’t what we think it is, or what we are told it is. This has the potential to be a huge problem for not only Activision, who now has a huge chunk of disgruntled consumers, but also for Sony, who did nothing in their power to please their customers. It really is quite a bold move on Microsoft’s part, considering it is a reality that people buy new platforms simply for the ability to play huge blockbuster games like Black Ops. Hell, ,I upgraded to a new desktop when I discovered that my old one could not run Half-Life 2.

Regardless of any fixes the 1.04 patch brings to PS3 owners, the fact that we have been playing and will be playing a less polished game with missing features remains, and when more consumers realize this the game publisher is going to have a huge problem on their hands in the future.

What do YOU think?

Fix for PS3 CoD Black Ops 1.04 Patch Seems to Work – Steps Detailed

Garrett Hartman — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 06:08:48 +0000

A possible solution to some of the connection and game freeze problems experienced by PS3 users after Patch 1.04 that has been discussed in the Call of Duty: Black Ops forums – seems to work.

The solution, mentioned by forum user stlcardinal9sr is as follows:

In the XMB delete your game save data and game data utility for Black Ops, all of your online stats will still be there, you will lose single player stats though, I decided to check this and found that the patch actually loaded into game save data and not where it should have in GAME DATA UTILITY…After deleting and redownloading everything works like it should!!!!

Steps to do this:

1. in the XMB under games where you would click on the disk to load black ops scroll up to where it says saved data utility.
2. delete this data, what will happen is you will lose all of your campaign progress and on your custom classes you will lose whatever you have named them but all of your classes will be the same and no online progress will be lost. just rename them
3. scroll up a little more to game data utility and click it and delete the black ops data, you will NOT lose any online progress.
4. now go reload the game up and it will require you to redownload the patch and you should be up and running.

happy gaming

We were not able to personally test this at RipTen – but we emailed the solution to readers who said it fixed most of the issues immediately.

*The solution is not perfect but will fix the patch for the user who corrected it. If the host of the match has not corrected this problem you can still have issues. The more people who correct this, the less issues people will have.

Note: This is not an authorized solution given by Treyarch

Call of Duty: Black Ops Patch 1.04 Brings PS3 Players More Headaches

Garrett Hartman — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:48:24 +0000

Earlier today Activision released patch 1.04 to address a myriad of issues plaguing Call of Duty: Black Ops. While not exclusively for the PS3 (for the Xbox 360 as well) the Ps3 version had been effected by more serious issues. Unfortunately, the patch has brought new issues.

There have been more frequent complaints about the game freezing, others have experienced constantly being dropped out of games. Still others complain of crashes and disconnections.

The effected gamers are primarily PS3 owners and have crashed the Call of Duty Website as they have come to complain in droves.

Read a few Ps3 owners rants.

***UPDATE: Possible Fix, click here***

Activision and developer Treyarch have been gathering data and are trying to find out what specifically went wrong.

Looks like patch 1.04 isn’t the cure-all many hoped it would be.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Patch 1.04 is Live – What it Fixed

Garrett Hartman — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:55:15 +0000

PS3 owners finally get the fixes they need with Call of Duty: Black Ops patch 1.04. Treyarch worked hard to get this update out in response to mounting problems that received complaints from a sizable number of PS3 owners. This is not to say Xbox 360 users didn’t have issues as well . . .

Update 1.04 is now live for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

***Update: PS3 Update has brought more headaches***

***Possible fix to PS3 Patch issues***

Hopefully all is well. Here’s what they fixed:

Issues Addressed:

Resolved several issues with parties getting disbanded unexpectedly.
Additional measures to prevent the “Transmission error” and other disconnects. This was most likely to occur with large parties where party members had mixed NAT types. (PS3 only)
Addressed an issue with VOIP icons not appearing when USB headsets were plugged in prior to game launch. (PS3 only)
Updated handling for UPnP-enabled routers to improve matchmaking conditions where users had strict or moderate NAT types. Also added in-game communications so that all players are aware of their NAT type in the Player Match party lobby.
Addressed issue that prevented the “Load MP by Default” option from saving when other specific option combinations were set. (Xbox 360 only)
Prevention of exploit that allowed players to keep custom classes and killstreaks after prestige.
Addressed an issue where Flak Jacket Pro would not always protect against ground fires left by Napalm Strikes.
Prevention of users losing their killstreak reward when switching classes at the start of a new round in round-based game modes.
Addressed an issue where the incorrect perks would appear when spectating another player under certain circumstances.
Added round start explosive delay to China Lake grenade launcher to give it the same round start limitations as other explosives.
Contracts will now reset when the player Prestiges.
Prevention of Valkyrie rocket exploding upon release under rare conditions.
Prevention of Gunship failing to give player full control under rare conditions.
Prevention of an issue where a player will get teleported outside the map boundaries under very specific circumstances.
Additional security measures to enhance detection and banning capabilities.

Gameplay Tuning:

Limit the ability to re-roll supply drops using Hardline Pro to Care Packages only, no other killstreak drops.
Added a negative influencer to all spawn points to decrease the chances of spawning near an enemy. This will further improve spawning protection on top of previous updates.
Additional sound mix tuning for Ninja Pro users – increased ranges and volume of enemy footsteps, and removed player footstep sounds on concrete material types.
Increased headshot multipliers for sniper rifles. Sniper rifles with suppressors equipped will now always be ensured one-shot kill headshots.
Subtle increase in sniper rifle accuracy when scoping in.
Added a render delay to the red diamond player indicators that appear when controlling the Gunship, Valkyrie Rocket and Chopper Gunner. When a player first spawns, this will not appear for a period of time.
Additional minor reductions in knife lunge.

Source

GT5 Update Races to Your PS3 This Weekend

Garrett Hartman — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 17:13:04 +0000

Sony’s long-awaited, recent released critically acclaimed racer Gran Turismo 5 will get an update on November 27th to, as designer Kazunori Yamauchi says, “refine the usability of the game to make it a better experience”. The update will include regulations such as max power and weight restrictions to tweak and improve online play.

Upon realease GT5′s “extreme online traffic congestion” hit the game’s data center affecting even single player games. As a temporary solution, Sony advised solo players to play while logged off of the PSN network. As it stood, the data center was configured to deal with 500,000 users but was hit by numbers far exceeding that limit.

As Yamauchi explained to Eurogamer:

“The design of the GT game really integrates the online and offline parts. So the problems online actually affected the offline play as well, right now we’ve changed the number of simultaneous connections that are possible to one million, doubling the number, and we’re trying to gauge what will happen, but we don’t know at this point in time.”

“It’s like a living creature, dynamically growing as we speak.” Yamauchi explained and the game will receive updates “every week, every month”. Upcoming updates will include matchmaking and leaderboards and are “all planned in the processs of evolution”.

Source

Microsoft Had My 360 Whacked (And Other Fun Stuff)

Dan Landis — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:40:45 +0000

Anyone who’s been following the news (or rumors, as Microsoft would have you believe) knows that I have not been having much luck with my 360. From the general Xbox Live problems that many people are experiencing to the disappearing achievements that I supposedly made up, things are not working the way they should. Microsoft apparently didn’t appreciate my whistle-blowing, however, because they’ve decided to shut me up by having my 360 clipped.

Before I go any further, let me clarify a few things. I love my 360. I love Xbox Live. It’s for these reasons that I get so upset when they don’t work. I don’t write these articles to bring unwarranted negative attention to Microsoft or the Xbox brand. I don’t do this to give the Sony fanboys more ammunition and perpetuate the flame wars. I don’t just make stuff up in the hopes of generating attention for our site, or me in particular. I don’t do this just for the money.

I write these articles because I’m unhappy with the state of the 360′s world. If a horde of people were made aware of the problems the 360 is having, especially if it lets them know they are not alone in their Xbox woes, then perhaps Microsoft would find the proper motivation to actually fix them (the problems, not the people). I write these articles to let everyone know that I will not just sit around and let Microsoft (or anyone else) pretend there is nothing wrong when there very clearly is. Public outcry is a powerful force.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me continue.

About two weeks prior to writing this article, I wrote up a a nice little piece about Xbox Live’s service troubles.

I quickly followed that up with an article about why I love Xbox Live, where I sarcastically pointed out the things that are actually great about it but were not working properly like Microsoft claimed they were.

Then last week, I wrote an article about disappearing Achievements. This, like the stories before it, was written from personal experience with the 360 and Xbox Live. I didn’t write it based on a rumor or hearsay, but from living through it myself. This prompted numerous responses on our website and other sites such as News4Gamers and Kotaku. The comment sections were full of people corroborating my story with their own experiences with disappearing Achievements.

While I can understand people not wanting to believe the story based on the fact that I have no hard evidence to prove it, as well as the notion that I’m just some amateur no-name looking to promote myself, the fact that so many other people have reported having the same experience should make it somewhat more credible. Microsoft doesn’t think so. Their official position is:

Xbox LIVE is not erasing Achievements earned while playing on the service. If any member is having trouble with their Xbox LIVE service, we urge them to contact 1-800-4-my-xbox.

Well thanks, Microsoft. I was having a problem and I did contact 1-800-4my-xbox. It was your people that confirmed to me that disappearing Achievements was, in fact, a known issue and offered me a solution (that I have yet to attempt because it seems impossible). Had your techies known they were talking to the great Dan Landis, Ripten writer extraordinaire, maybe they would have sung a different tune to prevent me shouting it from the rooftops.

So now that I’ve given you enough context for this story and done enough self-promoting, let me continue with what’s new.

RRoD. To those of you that have never seen that before (which I find hard to believe), that stands for Red Ring of Death. It’s the current term used to describe the three flashing red lights on the 360′s face when it goes kaput. I just got it last night. This really isn’t that strange — it happens to a lot of us. So why am I writing an article about it? Well, it’s what followed that got me typing.

All red and no green makes Dan a sad boy.

Not 10 minutes after I saw those beautiful red lights did I get a call from none other than Mike. If you don’t know who Mike is, you’ve got plenty of company because I don’t know who he is either. He claimed to be from Microsoft Consumer Relations.

“I was just calling to confirm your issue with missing Achievements. Specifically, I want to know whether or not our customer service agent has resolved your complaint so that we can help other people with the same issue. Is this still an issue for you?”

I tell him that the previous agent said I need to get another achievement in the same game to update my profile, which should then unlock my previously earned achievement that had disappeared. I don’t really see myself ever getting any of the remaining achievements because they are just too hard, so I haven’t even tried the supposed solution. Now that I already have him on the phone, however, I wanted to report that my 360 has died and needs repaired.

“Really? Well, that’s very unfortunate. I can’t assist you with that problem at this time because that is not my department. You’ll have to call 1-800-4my-xbox during normal business hours.”

Oh, right. It isn’t normal business hours right now. In fact it’s 2:30am. I ask him why he’s calling me now if it isn’t normal business hours, and he tells me that I had called them before during this time frame, so they base their callbacks on that. Then he thanks me for my time and hangs up.

Very strange. So it appears to me that Microsoft hired a Black Ops guy named Mike (obviously a cover) to stealth-kill my 360, and then call me to make sure the job was successful. Even if you aren’t a conspiracy nut, you have to find the timing to be more than just a coincidence.

Mike calls at 2:30 in the morning (strange) and asks about an issue that supposedly isn’t acknowledged by Microsoft to even exist (also strange). And this happens less than 10 minutes after my 360 dies on me (super strange). Either Microsoft is trying to send a message, some Xbox fanboy is upset with my stories and hacked my shit, or it really is just a strange coincidence. I’ll let you be the judge.

Moving on. I go out to “24-hour store whose name I won’t mention because I loathe giving them my money” and pick up another 360. I’m working on a review of Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom and, obviously, I need to play the game to do that. I’ve been wanting to get another 360 anyways, so this just gave me an easy excuse to justify it to my wife. Long story short, the power supply of my new 360 doesn’t work.

So I called 1-800-4my-xbox today during normal business hours and reported all of my issues. Apparently I can’t send my new power supply in the same box with my old 360 because it’s “harder to track”. The power supply needs a separate box that I have to pay to ship to them, even though it’s brand new and not my fault that it doesn’t work. I tell the woman on the phone (Rita) to forget it, that I’ll just take it back to the store and get a new one. She then gets confused and cancels the repair order on my 360. After about 20 more minutes, we get everything straight: repair my old 360, and I’ll replace my new 360 on my own.

Do I really think Microsoft or some hacker broke my 360? No, not really. It is a strange coincidence, but that’s probably all it is. I sometimes wonder if Microsoft cleverly designed the 360 to break after a year and make people like me buy a “backup” 360 to alleviate my worries. What a great way to increase sales! Surprisingly, none of the stores I called to get a replacement 360 (Target, Wal-Mart, Gamestop, EBGames) had any in stock, and the one I had purchased last night was the last one from that particular store. Have they really not received any shipments since the holiday rush? Are too many people buying new systems because their friends got one, or are that many systems defective that all those people are already needing replacements? Discuss.

Basically, the point of this article is to address the baggage the 360 currently comes with. It’s incredibly frustrating, and someone with less patience than me would quickly give up on it altogether. Someone on the fence about whether or not they should “Jump In” might decide against it because you’ve filled the pool with shit. Please, Microsoft, for the love of Mike — stop pissing off your customers and get it together.

This was going to be a pool full of shit, but that would just be gross.

Ratchet and Clank HD Pixelation Issue? Insomniac Responds

Patrick Steen — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:53:14 +0000

There has been some discussion about the recently released demo of Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction for the Playstation 3 on the well known gaming forum Neogaf. A very select few have been having some visual troubles with the game, resulting in a pixelated mess on their HDTVs. This is surprising, since most who have experienced the beauty of Insomniac’s game can see that it is very sharp and pretty damn special to say the least. So what is going on here?

On some 1080p HDTV’s Ratchet and Clank appears to be pixelated, or in the best possible words – a garbled mess. Now reports of this have been few and far between, but it seems that although being a 720p game, when 720p is selected on the display options for the Playstation 3 the game does not appear as it should on some HDTV’s (a 52inch 1080p Sony Bravia is one of the mentioned televisions). When 720p is unchecked, leaving only 1080i and 1080p the picture in fact clears up but at the bottom-right of the screen is a block of broken up, fuzziness.

What could be the problem? Well some research has been done at the Beyond3d forums, suggesting that Ratchet and Clank is 704p or 704by1280 pixels instead of the regular 720by1280. This is unlike the Halo 3 problem of being a 640p image (or even Conan at 576p) being upscaled to 720p (and higher) since Ratchet and Clank is not upscaled by the Playstation3.

Upscaling from 640p to 720p would cause some strange exaggeration of aliasing, and other minor problems with picture quality. Instead, Ratchet and Clank cuts off 8pixels above and below, meaning the remaining image will still be rendered at 720p but with small black bars above and below, such as you would see when you watch an HD film on your television. A 1080p film will have black borders above and below, thus not using all the pixels, but the quality that is displayed still means it is 1080p. Ratchet and Clank is even less extreme than this, since the black borders would be almost unnoticeable if your HDTV didn’t use overscan to remove them completely. This image is sent from the Playstation to your television, and then the overscan of your television will make the final picture fit the screen, thus not showing the black bars.

Ratchet and Clank being 704p is thus a clever way to save some pixels without impacting visual quality, for Ratchet and Clank is so gorgeous to experience, especially at 60fps, that you will double check to make sure you are not playing through a Pixar film. But could this be a problem for some 1080i/p HDTV’s? It’s not clear if it is, but it could be due to these televisions upscaling from 704p without overscan.

Whatever the problem is, Insomniac seems to be keen to get it fixed for every HDTV out there. ~~While we have yet to confirm that the following is indeed from an employee of Insomniac, it appears that one~~ One of the Insomniac team members has personally posted on the Neogaf forum asking exactly what the trouble is. ~~If it is a member of Insomniac, it would be~~ This is proof of just how down to earth the developer is.

“Hey guys,

Can you send me any brand/model numbers of TVs you have if you are having issues and what the issue is, plus what settings you are running (screen caps are helpful too).

We believe the lower right corner garbling issue appears to only be happening with 1080i/p output forced and with no-overscan. The vast majority of people shouldn’t experience it, and we highly recommend ensuring your PS3 has 720p output enabled as RCF will look best at that resolution and it should correct the issue.

If you’re having the strange pixelation issues, we want to try to replicate that here. We’ve never seen it in-house on all of our various HD sets, and knowing what TVs we need to track down would be helpful.

Appreciate your help
JS”

So let’s hope Insomniac gets this fixed for those that have the problem, otherwise some sorry sods will be missing out on one of the best looking games the Playstation 3 has to offer.

(Note: Insomniac has not confirmed that the game is rendered at 704p.)

Sources: Neogaf, Beyond3d

Update – 10/16 7:36 PM EST
The poster on the Neogaf board has been confirmed as an actual employee of Insomniac. Well known to the board, and featured in several of Insomniac’s Podcasts.