PS3 / Xbox Video Support Comparison
I own both the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. I have searched high and low to figure out the best way to configure them and connect them to my entertainment center. After a bit of research, it appears that Microsoft and Sony took completely different directions with how to handle both video and audio support in their next generation systems. In this blog post I will describe how both systems implemented their video support.
The Xbox 360 can handle rendering in a few different ways, and it depends on the game. Some games will render to a specific target resolution and then upscale or downscale the video to the resolution you have set in the Xbox 360 Dashboard. Other games will render the game in one of a set of supported resolutions. If the resolution you set in the Xbox 360 Dashboard matches one of these resolutions, it will send the image directly to your television. If the resolution is not supported by your television it will render the game using the closest resolution and upscale / downscale the output as necessary.
Due to the way the Xbox 360 handles the upscaling and downscaling of the rendered output, you have to be very careful about how you configure your television. If you set the Xbox 360 to output at a resolution that does not match the exact native resolution of your television you may run into issues with the video getting scaled twice. This is due to the fact that the Xbox 360 will possibly upscale / downscale the rendered output, and then your television will also upscale / downscale the image to your native resolution. In some cases there will be no way to set your Xbox 360 to match the native resolution of your television and it will be impossible to avoid these artifacts.
In the case of my Westinghouse 32” television, I had to use a VGA cable in order to have it output video without the scaling artifacts. The resolution of the screen is 1366×768, which is not a standard HD resolution like 720p or 1080p. So if I used a component cable to hook up the Xbox 360, I wasn’t able to select a resolution that matched the television’s resolution. With the VGA cable it let me set the resolution to 1360×768 which was almost my exact native resolution. I was missing three pixels on each side of the screen, but you wouldn’t be able to tell unless someone told you about it. So with that configuration, at worst the video would only be scaled once.
On the other hand the PS3 will output the video at the exact resolution it is rendered at. The resolution used will be the maximum resolution supported by both the game and your television. So if the original image is rendered at 720p, it will send exactly that to your television. Your television will need to do the upscaling / downscaling of the game itself. This can either be good or bad. If the upscaling in your television is really good, you will get a great image. If the upscaling in your television sucks, everything will look like crap. This also means if your television’s native resolution does not exactly match 720p or 1080p, your video will be scaled no matter what.
At the end of the day, both methods of outputting video can be better in particular cases. If you have a television with good upscaling, that supports 1080p as its native resolution of 1920×1080, then the way the PS3 handles things will most likely work better for you. This is due to the fact that your television’s upscaler chip is probably better than what is inside the Xbox 360. If your television has poor upscaling, and your native resolution is supported, the way the Xbox 360 handles things will probably make things look a lot nicer.