Nvidia and ATI cards upscale? playing Crysis on HDTV and moniter.

Well I will probably playing Crysis at resolutions of 1280x800 to 1440x900 and I was wondering if the newer high end Nvidia and ATI GPUs have upscaling. I ask this question because while I was still a console gamer with both Xbox 360 and PS3, I noticed Gears of War on the Xbox 360 looked very hi-res (due to hardware accelerated upscaling from 720p to 1080p) while Resistance 2 on the PS3 looked lower res (still 720p but PS3 has no hardware acclerated upscaling). I will be playing Crysis on my 1080p HDTV and WUXGA screen and I was wondering if my laptop GPU will upscale the resolution to 1080p.

Note: Upscaling is different from just enlarging the image to fit the screen.

 

Not sure what upscaling is, but I doubt video cards have it. Consoles have very weak videocards (the PS3 has a Nvidia 7800GTX clone), so they need otherways of reaching high definition. Your only real option is to set the resolution.

 

Upscaling, ive heard of this. To me it doesent say much, stuff is still gonna be pixelated. Its probably just like a ripoff of smart objects in photoshop where it trys to make the object stretch and not become as pixelated.

Its probably a ripoff of something like that.
I don't think it will ever come to pc.

Honestly, I don't think I would care for it, Crysis I enjoy at 1440x900 in a mix of gamer/enthusiast and some midrange at playable fps (with 3850).

 

well I do notice a visual difference. And there are hundreds of articles regarding the PS3 and Xbox 360 in upscaling. Also it's not a ripoff gimmick. Lots of DVD players, monitors, etc. have upscaling capability.

 

Upscaling is basically just stretching with some anti-aliasing and blurring to make the larger pixels look like they aren't.

A lot of higher end HDTVs have an upscaling feature built-in (in order to display a 720p image on a 1080p screen), as do many dvd and bluray players. Whether an image is upscaled or not is largely irrelevant as long as you like what you're looking at.

Gameplay, on the other hand, is where an upscaled game isn't as good as one running at a higher native resolution. In a first person shooter, you will literally have more potential places your pointer can select on the screen in a higher native resolution. In an upscaled game, your pointer simply becomes bigger and the number of potential places you could click remains the same as whatever the native resolution is that you upscaled.

 

yea, however upscaling is still better than merely a low native res resized to a bigger size. So I was wondering if ATI and Nvidia cards can do this when I am laying Crysis on a monitor or HDTV.

 

PC GPUs do not upscale games. The closest you'll get to that upscale effect would be using MSAA.

 

exactly this.

However, if you ARE using an HDTV and it has built in upscaling, that will do the work for you. Many do have this feature because otherwise DVDs played on a DVD player that does not upscale would look very poor.

Here's a link with more on what I'm talking about:
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news-article/17700/toshiba-unveils-upscaling-hdtv

 

The TV might do the upscaling, I know mine does. I played Grid at 1280x800 on a 1080p TV and it looked marvellous. And that was without AA.

 

while reading about the ATI Mobility 4800s series I noticed something:

"Go Beyond HD Video
With ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4800 Series graphics watch the latest HD movies play with incredible fidelity2 and low CPU utilization – upscale to nearly twice the display resolution of HD content4,5 or watch standard definition video in near-HD quality with enhanced DVD up-scaling6. Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) playback capabilities7,8. With ATI Avivo™ HD video* has never looked better with the advanced video processing technologies delivering brilliant picture clarity. ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4800 offers support for the latest audio visual interconnects. Dual DisplayPort™ and HDMI with 7.1 surround sound ensures you can take advantage of the latest display technology."

http://ati.amd.com/products/MobilityRadeonhd4800/index.html

does that mean it can upscale games too? additionally, does Nvidia have something like this upscaling too?

 

That only deals with video playback, not 3d rendering.

 

When I had my desktop hooked up to our HDTV, I played Crysis at 1280x720 and it looked just fine to me.

The one problem was that when I played the game in DX10 mode, the TV would set the refresh rate to 24hz instead of 60hz and so there would be screen tearing whenever I quickly made movements like quickly looking up at the sky or down at the ground. It did not exist in DX9 mode and I've seen others complaining about it as well. This problem does not exist on my monitor now.

 

Just wonderin guys, when I play games on my laptop at a non native resolution, the game still takes up the full screen.

So surely this is upscaling?

I assume this would be the graphics card doing the upscaling?

So in principle it should be the same for a HDTV.

Unless I'm wrong?

 

not sure, some 720p games from PS3 (without upscaling) still take up the whole screen, while Xbox 360 games with hardware accelerated upscaling also take up the whole screen...so I don't know.

 

Bingo!.........

 

To the OP:

I’m pretty sure this is how the upscaling will work on your PC:

When you connect to the TV, you will either use it as an extended desktop, or as your main display.

You will then set the resolution of this desktop to the native resolution of your TV (1920x1080 in this case?).

When you run the game, you can choose the resolution that you want it to run at.

If it is the native resolution, then all well and good. If it is a non-native resolution, then the graphics card will upscale this to the resolution you have set the desktop at.​

Hope this helps!


On a side note, say you wanted to game at 1280x720 on your 1920x1080 display, you can see the difference between the graphics card’s upscaling and your TV’s upscaling by doing the following:

Instead of setting the desktop resolution to the native resolution of you TV, set it to the resolution you want to game at.

The TV will then upscale this to its native resolution 1080p, rather than the graphics card.​

Try it out and see if you notice any differences.

 

Upscaling is just a shorter way of describing what your video card or the display does to the signal. Most HDTV's have built in upscaling of all standard TV format resolutions that are lower than the native resolution. Say if your trying to use a 720P signal on a 1080P TV, the TV it's self will automatically stretch the image over the 1920x1080 pixels so that it fits the entire screen and there won't be a smaller image in the middle of the screen surrounded by black bars.

Upscaling does NOT make the image look better, it also does not mean that AA or other features are added to the image, it only means that it is stretched to fit the entire display.

Consoles like the Xbox360 have hardware upscaling, this is NOT for a better image, this is actually because console games have a set resolution in which they're rendered in. Take GTA4 for instance, the game is actually rendered in a resolution lower than 1280x720, and is not a standard TV resolution, so the TV would not know how to handle it, therefor the console stretches the lower resolution image across how ever many pixels you set the console to in the console's setup so that your TV can even accept it.

PC graphics cards do not scale to set resolutions. That is controlled by your HDTV. While you can scale a set image, you can not scale a lower image and output it to a higher format like consoles can, again, this is controlled by the TV.

Basically as long as you keep to the basic TV formats, 640x480, 704x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080, your TV will automatically do all of the scaling. Also note that if you use 30Hz 1920x1080 instead of 60Hz or higher, most TV's will automatically go into 1080i mode, which is actually downscaled to 1440x1080 and has a huge amount of delay because of the interpolation and low frequency.

 

If I am understanding you correctly, what you are saying is wrong. They definitely scale to set resolutions.

If you ran a game at a non native resolution to your screen, then without upscaling, it would be displayed with black bars around the edges.

The game runs in full screen at a non native resolution because of the upscaling the pc does.

 

thanks! I'll try that. I bet the GPU' upscaling is better.

 

TV's arent like regular monitors...

TV's have their own upscaling, AA, etc... whatever the heck tech
Thats why 32 vs 62 inch looks the same even though they have the same pixel count (not EVERY TV but most)