PS3 & Xbox 360 (anyone playing in 480i?)

[gamevet]

Well, I met a friend last night (he's a programmer) for some beers at a local Sherlocks and he broke it down for me. I was half right...

If a Video Card/CPU have to render at high resolutions, that will use more power which will in turn produce more heat. Rendering an engine at 800x600 is going to use less power than 1024x768 and onward.

Now... if it's true that the P3 & 360 'ONLY' render at 480P and simply upscale (or downscale in my case... down to 480i), then they're most likely not using more power which means they're probably not generating more heat.

My buddy said it depends though... if the video card inside the P3 & 360 is doing the upscaling, there might be some extra power usage during that process, but he also said that most likely, there's a seperate processor on board specifically for upscaling and that's it not that intensive an operation.

So, a card capable of Variable Rendering is going to use more juice and thusly cause more heat at higher resolutions, and a card that renders at a native resolution and upscales to attain higher resolutions is going to use hardly any extra power which means hardly any extra heat generated if any.


For $350, I'm really proud of my purchase. This is the cheapest, most effective Gaming PC I've ever had (the P3). I'm going to refrain from calling it a 'wanna be' PC because it packs a lot of power for a very small cost... and it's very, very user friendly.

Did you notice my post about the display modes for the PS3?

[Joe Redifer]

The PS3 can now upscale to whatever resolution you want, but it is still up to the developer to implement it. I leave my PS3 set at the highest resolution possible. If a game is 720p (which most are), the game plays in 720p. If it is 1080, it plays at 1080. Since you cannot do this with the Xbox 360, I just have it set at 720p I think as 1080 didn't look very good over the included cables... I think that was the reason, I barely touch that console.

And yes, the PS3 can natively render in 1920x1080 and several games do. I don't think any PS3 game upscales from 480p, that would be absurd.

I think Oldschool is trying to troll, though. He is coming up with things that he knows people will argue over like "stereo is best, games sound like crap in surround" or whatnot. It's what he does. Next he will insist that the Genesis sounds best in mono only when heard over RF through the TV speaker.

[gamevet]

And yes, the PS3 can natively render in 1920x1080 and several games do. I don't think any PS3 game upscales from 480p, that would be absurd.

True, the PS3 almost never upscaled 480p to higher resolutions. The PS3 started out downscaling from 480p, for televisions that are 480i, and it upscaled from 720p for the higher resolution televisions, though there were several games that upscaled to 1080i, from 480p. There are several titles that are truely 1080p, including Wipeout HD.

[Devil N]

I think Oldschool is trying to troll, though. He is coming up with things that he knows people will argue over like "stereo is best, games sound like crap in surround" or whatnot. It's what he does. Next he will insist that the Genesis sounds best in mono only when heard over RF through the TV speaker.

Well, that is in fact the most "Old School" way to play on it.

Pardon the pun.

[kool kitty89]

Sanyo is the bottom of the barrel, when it comes to LCD. The scaling and color processing is horrible. Plus, you're talking about a $400 television, at most, so the amount of technology behind the system board probably is very low cost.

Firstly when I said "older big screen TVs" I meant projection CRT SDTVs given your comment about jaggies on a 27" TV.

The comments thereafter were general comments about HDTVs: basically that your comment either only applied to old SDTV big screens, or that (for some reason) someone was using 480p/480i on an HDTV. (I suppose if you were using the pack-in composite cables with the PS3 )

That Sanyo seems fine scaling wise though, except I haven't messed with any SDTV stuff on it. It definitely looks best at the native 1360x768 resolution though (via VGA -HDMI has stupid limitations -pillarboxed 1024x768 is the only native resolution that will display).
I messed arround with it a lot (including the color balance, contrast, brightness and all the filters) and got a good custom set-up. It's fine though, and the scaling (and associated AA) isn't really any worse than that I've seen on typical LCD PC monitors from 5 years ago up to present. (highest end ones are probably the year old iMacs and Mac Pros at the college -unless you count stuff I've browsed at fry's)
The default settings were terrible though, as with most HDTVs.

I've actually never used that for any HD consoles though: my dad uses it as his PC monitor (again 1360x768 via VGA -or DVI-A to VGA rather). There's no noticeable lag though, which is the really important factor for gaming. (spent a lot of time with the Xbox and a bit of Wii time on it)

I have seen some nice LG and Samsung 1080p HD sets used for gaming too, though haven't played it much. (I never argued that that isn't better still)
However, I still haven't seen any that fully match the quality of a good high resolution CRT monitor (not CRT HDTV -which are rather disappointing compared to good VGA monitors). The newer high-end LCDs seem to hae really closed the gap on contract and color, but there's nothign they can physically do to really compete with a true multi-sync analog display scaling wise. (at least until you get screens with massively high resolutions to compensate -high enough to significantly exceed the phosphor dot resolution of high-end CRT monitors -you'd probably need close to double to really exceed a high-end analog display in every aspect -more so if there was still an emphasis on such displays in the mainstream -a shame there isn't)
Plasma sets are OK, though the pixels are large (and resolution is thus limited), plus all I've seen (mostly Sony sets) seem to have terrible SDTV support if nothing else.

I will also say that the scaling/denterlacing on our 4-5 yar old 17" Phillips LCD SDTV is great for both 240p and 480i content and games. (and it had better be as that's all it displays )
And matching (or exceeding) an SDTV with the common coarse dot pitch and low beam precision is much easier than high res CRTs... but then there's the issue of actual SDTV support.

I use a 24" LG (1080p) LCD for my computer, and I also have a Dreamcast (VGA) and 360 (HDMI) hooked up to it. It's a pretty decent display, but the color range doesn't come close to the quality of my $2,000 Samsung 52" LCD in the livingroom. I was able to calibrate the Samsung with the user interface within the television menus, while I don't believe I could go quite as deep with the LG, without getting the service codes for the display.

Outside of color/contrast issues, are there any issues with input lag (not motion blur)?
How's the 1080i support or the 720p scaling for that matter? (or more variable resolutions using the PC for that matter -we found that using HDMI on our PC forced a far more limited selection of resolutions than using VGA -I know that's not a problem with DVI or digital output in general, but I've heard HDMI connections tend to have odd artificial limitations on them -or maybe it's set by the device used)

I'm not talking about old videocards, like the GeForce 5200 that had S-Video outputs for SDTV. I'm saying that someone wouldn't buy an expensive card like the 9800 GTX to play games on a SDTV, especially since the card didn't support it.

Yeah, but the resolution argument is no different.
PC resolutions haven't changed nearly as much as consoles since the late 90s. How is playing a 720p (or one of the less common 1080p) native games on a 480i display any less silly than playing a 6 or 7 year old game that would run at any of various high resolutions on a PC monitor (1024x768, 1280x720, 1360x768, 1280x960, 1440x900, 1280x1084, etc) but output it via S-video or component to an SDTV for convenience or because you have a small monitor, etc? (in a given case with a PC near an SDTV -say like in our case, where there's the family PC adjacent to the entertainment center in out family room)
That's the same set-up we used for DVDs prior to getting an actual DVD player. (actually via composite as our old trinitron was composite only -had that until 2004 I think)

As for the card not supporting SDTV output: EDTVs would still be a factor. (via VGA -DVI-A, if component output wasn't available)

Comparing the scaling range of the 360 and PS3, to the whole catalog of video cards for the PC isn't even a comparison of apples to apples. The 360 and PS3 were designed around HD gaming displays and the fact that they are forced to support those low-end televisions, sort of cripples what they can do to support every range of television. What I was saying was: It would be stupid for someone to shell out the cash for a 9800 GTX and then hook it up to a low resolution display (even though you can't), since you could probably buy a $50 video card that would produce the same kind of performance at such a low resolution.

There's absolutely no reason they shouldn't have catered to a wide range of resolutions... or rather developers allowed for a wide range of native rendering resolutions, and not just that, but full detail options like with PC games. As it is, that was the case with previous generation consoles to a modest extent. (there was often performance improvements for running in low detail modes for games that did offer high res or added detail -like N64 games supporting high res or some PS2 or Xbox games that had higher rendering resolutions -I think some of those may have been false advertizing though and simple upscaled low res rendering)

It would be equally stupid for someone to shell out the cash for a Blu-Ray player, only to turn around and hook it up to a SDTV; you wouldn't notice the benefits of the media compared to DVD.

You can still see some benefits: less frame dropping, lack of compression artifacts, audio quality, etc: but that would have been mitigated had there been a high-quality SD format succeeding DVDs as a low-end alternative. (ie 480i or 480p MPEG 4 video with higher peak bitrate allotment than standard DVD, sort of like SVCD was to VCD)
Anyway, you wouldn't get a lot of the advantages of DVDs if you had a cheap mid 90s RF only CRT: hell you'd probably have to pass it through your old VCD due to the lack of RF output on DVD players. (or get the RF adapter for the Playstation is you were using a PS2 )
I'm sure that was not unheard of either. (actually I know several people who got PS2s and used them via RF -one who still does on a little 15" TV )

I'm not talking about hi-res CRTs. I'm talking about a cheap television in the range of a 27" Sony Wega, that only supports S-video, Composite and Component inputs up to 480i. I retired my 17" IBM CRT ealier in the year and I have no regrets about doing it.

I was responding to this:

I wonder why anyone would buy a PS3 or 360 and then dummy it down to play on a crappy 480i CRT? It's like someone buying a GeForce GTX 480, and then connecting it to a 1280 x 1084 CRT.

Please not that I never, ever meant to say that SD gaming with a PS3 or 360 was the best option in any respect: a good HDTV (or high res monitor) with corresponding sound system (mainly at least decent speaker quality -Surround is nice, though it really depends on preference -at least stereo though ) is definitely the best option there, though if you have 720p or 1080p sets of generally equal quality (simile color, contrast, scaling, lag, etc), there probably isn't that much of an advantage for 1080p for a 360, but more for the PS3. (unless all games DO support 720p native and 1080p games aren't just downscaled) Even more so if games actually supported a 768p native rendering mode. (again given that most 720p LCD/Plasma sets actually have that resolution, or at least if you can set your TV to display 720p in a non-scaled window with a boarder -but I think you might need to go into the service menu to do that if you can at all, I should try that on the Sanyo -it had a ton of different "pix shape" options for 480p displays including full overscan, it would be interesting to see for 720p)

My main point is that games are still going to look amazing compared to Wii or last gen consoles even on an SDTV. They will look a lot better still at their full resolution on any decent HDTV (lag is the only playability issue, but I've actually not come across that on any HD set I've played on).
But for any PC gamer it's really more of the same, or at least anyone who's used to messing around with resolutions a lot. (and likewise, such gamers will also know that you can only go so high before it really stops making much of a difference on a given screen... except for LCD monitors due to the fixed native resolution and scaling screwing stuff up more)

Well, I met a friend last night (he's a programmer) for some beers at a local Sherlocks and he broke it down for me. I was half right...

If a Video Card/CPU have to render at high resolutions, that will use more power which will in turn produce more heat. Rendering an engine at 800x600 is going to use less power than 1024x768 and onward.

Now... if it's true that the P3 & 360 'ONLY' render at 480P and simply upscale (or downscale in my case... down to 480i), then they're most likely not using more power which means they're probably not generating more heat.

My buddy said it depends though... if the video card inside the P3 & 360 is doing the upscaling, there might be some extra power usage during that process, but he also said that most likely, there's a seperate processor on board specifically for upscaling and that's it not that intensive an operation.

So, a card capable of Variable Rendering is going to use more juice and thusly cause more heat at higher resolutions, and a card that renders at a native resolution and upscales to attain higher resolutions is going to use hardly any extra power which means hardly any extra heat generated if any.

Except there's absolutely NO game on the PS3 or 360 that's going to be upscaling from 480p so ALL you games that you play in 480i ARE being scaled down to that resolution (and then interlaced and converted down to 15 kHz on top of that).
Most 360 games are 720p native with a few 1080p (be it 960x1080 or 1920x1080) and a lot more 1080p games on the PS3.

I'm not sure if any games actually support rendering in more than one resolution though, it could be that all games render in a native res and downscale (perhaps simply using larger text for lower res modes as I've yet to see any text that can't be read at 480i via composite no less -except on a crap TV with blurry composite).

The added heat/power consumed for simple scaling should be insignificant to the overall system.

Also, the only reason you'd even ever use scaling for an HDTV would be if text in 1080p is hard to read using the onboard scaling of a 720p set, having an older 720p or 1080i set without any scaling support (not sure if that's even an issue), or if you have a 1080p set that has crap scaling, so it would be preferable to use native upscaling.

That still doesn't change the fact that having the flexibility of true variable rendering/detail options (like PC games) would be totally awesome: be it being able to use 768p of "720p" HDTVs (only or the highest native resolution of various monitors), being able to select your own trade-offs of graphical settings, etc. (of course with defaults for anyone who doesn't care to mess with that)

I think the main problem with 720p HD sets is that, via HDMI, they fail to properly transmit their proper native resolution (at very least a problem when using PCs), though using VGA or component would solve that by bypassing the digital interface and corresponding identification. (VGA can have such identification too, but I don't think HDTVs tend to provide such -that's definitely the case with our TV, and it's VGA all the way for that reason)
I'm not sure if that's a problem with most 720p sets, or if it's more common on some LCDs than others or Plasma for that matter.
But, in addition to resolution there's tons of other rendering options that one could modify to their liking. (particularly trading detail for framerate or vice versa)


And again, my no means am I saying that SDTVs are anywhere near the best for playing PS3 or 360 games, but that it's still quite acceptable for most stuff.
It's more or less comparable to dropping down to 640x480 on modern PC games. (though 480p on any decent PC monitor -including LCDs- is better than SDTV ouput) In fact, 640x480 on a newer game might still be acceptable if you have an older system and want a nice high framerate. (or do it just for fun to see what it looks like ) More likely you wouldn't drop below 1024x768 or maybe 800x600 though.

[OldSchool]

The PS3 can now upscale to whatever resolution you want, but it is still up to the developer to implement it. I leave my PS3 set at the highest resolution possible. If a game is 720p (which most are), the game plays in 720p. If it is 1080, it plays at 1080. Since you cannot do this with the Xbox 360, I just have it set at 720p I think as 1080 didn't look very good over the included cables... I think that was the reason, I barely touch that console.

And yes, the PS3 can natively render in 1920x1080 and several games do. I don't think any PS3 game upscales from 480p, that would be absurd.

I think Oldschool is trying to troll, though. He is coming up with things that he knows people will argue over like "stereo is best, games sound like crap in surround" or whatnot. It's what he does. Next he will insist that the Genesis sounds best in mono only when heard over RF through the TV speaker.

I'm convinced they don't render in anything higher than 480P... they simply upscale which looks pretty good but it's not the same as rendering in the resoution to begin with.

Pointing the Troll finger eh... that's funny coming from an "admin".
I'm a Producer you nitwit... I have a very strong opinion on Stereo sound. So now everytime I state my opinion, I'm "trolling the other users".


If you can't take part in a conversation without getting your tits in a knicker (obviously, the thought of your precious Console getting hot at higher resolutions has you peeved), then find another thread to point Troll Fingers at thank you kindly.

Did you notice my post about the display modes for the PS3?

No... what did it say?

There's absolutely no reason they shouldn't have catered to a wide range of resolutions... or rather developers allowed for a wide range of native rendering resolutions, and not just that, but full detail options like with PC games. As it is, that was the case with previous generation consoles to a modest extent. (there was often performance improvements for running in low detail modes for games that did offer high res or added detail -like N64 games supporting high res or some PS2 or Xbox games that had higher rendering resolutions -I think some of those may have been false advertizing though and simple upscaled low res rendering)


Except there's absolutely NO game on the PS3 or 360 that's going to be upscaling from 480p so ALL you games that you play in 480i ARE being scaled down to that resolution (and then interlaced and converted down to 15 kHz on top of that).
Most 360 games are 720p native with a few 1080p (be it 960x1080 or 1920x1080) and a lot more 1080p games on the PS3.

I'm not sure if any games actually support rendering in more than one resolution though, it could be that all games render in a native res and downscale (perhaps simply using larger text for lower res modes as I've yet to see any text that can't be read at 480i via composite no less -except on a crap TV with blurry composite).

The added heat/power consumed for simple scaling should be insignificant to the overall system.

Also, the only reason you'd even ever use scaling for an HDTV would be if text in 1080p is hard to read using the onboard scaling of a 720p set, having an older 720p or 1080i set without any scaling support (not sure if that's even an issue), or if you have a 1080p set that has crap scaling, so it would be preferable to use native upscaling.

That still doesn't change the fact that having the flexibility of true variable rendering/detail options (like PC games) would be totally awesome: be it being able to use 768p of "720p" HDTVs (only or the highest native resolution of various monitors), being able to select your own trade-offs of graphical settings, etc. (of course with defaults for anyone who doesn't care to mess with that)

I think the main problem with 720p HD sets is that, via HDMI, they fail to properly transmit their proper native resolution (at very least a problem when using PCs), though using VGA or component would solve that by bypassing the digital interface and corresponding identification. (VGA can have such identification too, but I don't think HDTVs tend to provide such -that's definitely the case with our TV, and it's VGA all the way for that reason)
I'm not sure if that's a problem with most 720p sets, or if it's more common on some LCDs than others or Plasma for that matter.
But, in addition to resolution there's tons of other rendering options that one could modify to their liking. (particularly trading detail for framerate or vice versa)


And again, my no means am I saying that SDTVs are anywhere near the best for playing PS3 or 360 games, but that it's still quite acceptable for most stuff.
It's more or less comparable to dropping down to 640x480 on modern PC games. (though 480p on any decent PC monitor -including LCDs- is better than SDTV ouput) In fact, 640x480 on a newer game might still be acceptable if you have an older system and want a nice high framerate. (or do it just for fun to see what it looks like ) More likely you wouldn't drop below 1024x768 or maybe 800x600 though.

I know why they did it... for safety. When you push Hardware less, you have less chances of it going bad on you.


Key words... "should be insignificant".
And most likely they are. Especially if the setup is like my friend suggested... i.e., the Upscaler being it's own seperate device. Either way, I'm right... the process of upscaling is going to cause Heat 'inside the console'.. however insignificant, it will be heat that wasn't there to begin with.

'If' in fact the Consoles are capable of Variable Rendering, then the answer to the question of Heat is a huuuuge yes. When a PC Video Card renders a game at a higher resolution, it uses more heat... this is fact.


At this point, it's one of two things: either the P3s/360s only render at 480P and upscale to attain the other resolutions = hardly any extra heat because of the simple upscale process (but still heat regardless, so it's a yes).

or

The P3s/360s render at various resolutions... 720P&1080i/P = causing considerably more heat than rendering at 480P (a definite yes).

[kool kitty89]

I'm convinced they don't render in anything higher than 480P... they simply upscale which looks pretty good but it's not the same as rendering in the resoution to begin with.

As I said, I don't think ANY 360 or PS3 games actually support 480p rendering, let alone use it exclusively. (other than some downloadable games perhaps)
It's really obvious that the games aren't upscaled from such low resolution.
However, again, most 360 games tend to be 720p (fewer 1080p) while there's a fair bit more in 1080p on the PS3, and again, I'm not sure if ANY game even supports both 1080p and 720p rendering or if all games only run in a single resolution and have the console scale to any other resolution being output. (it would make things simpler for programmers: not having to have software support various rendering modes and such and dealing with rasterization at different pixel aspect ratios as well -especially for 480p/480i which tend to be non-square pixels, let alone supporting both 4:3 and 16:9 -I do remember playing my friend's 360 in 4:3 at 1080p and having the proper aspect ratio on a 4:3 monitor, but I don't remember how that worked)

And it wouldn't push the hardware harder so to speak... most games hit a wall somewhere regardless, so IF they did support 480p rendering
That's exactly why I commented about user selectable detail levels and actual different rendering modes as one could chose to drop to lower res in favor of higher framerate, let alone the various other detail options (model detail, detail at distance, texture quality, filtering, AA, reflections, shadow, particle effects, etc), the sort of stuff that's been common on PC games since the mid 90s. (It's NOT just useful due to varying system requirements, but useful for catering to different preferences on IDENTICAL machines: some people might prefer playing a game at max settings at 15 fps, while others might prefer dropping the detail to allow 60 fps, etc -even going back to Doom and such, you had people preferrign to have full screen at high detail and low framerate vs dropping to low detail and stepping down the framerate a bit: a shame consoles didn't support flexible detail modes then too for similar preference reasons: especially if the 3DO version had supported low detail mode rather than forcing high detail and only offering screen size options -that could have doubled framerate at any given screen size: the SNES, Jag, and 32x versions forced low detail and a fixed screen size)

Though up to HD support, actual variable resolution modes would have been somewhat limited (namely 320 vs 640 wide -or very close to that- and 240p vs 480i and 480p support later on -though the horizontal res was fully variable on the TV side, so the consoles could do anything their hardware catered to, vertical res is fixed for SDTVs at 240p/480i or 288/576i PAL -less due to typical overscan-), that wouldn't change detail options or variable sceen size or such though: that would still have been possible even with a single fixed resolution. (but in the case of variable res on the N64, there's a notable speed improvement at 320x240 or 320x480 vs 640x480 -might be some 640x240 games too)

[OldSchool]

As I said, I don't think ANY 360 or PS3 games actually support 480p rendering, let alone use it exclusively. (other than some downloadable games perhaps)
It's really obvious that the games aren't upscaled from such low resolution.
However, again, most 360 games tend to be 720p (fewer 1080p) while there's a fair bit more in 1080p on the PS3, and again, I'm not sure if ANY game even supports both 1080p and 720p rendering or if all games only run in a single resolution and have the console scale to any other resolution being output. (it would make things simpler for programmers: not having to have software support various rendering modes and such and dealing with rasterization at different pixel aspect ratios as well -especially for 480p/480i which tend to be non-square pixels, let alone supporting both 4:3 and 16:9 -I do remember playing my friend's 360 in 4:3 at 1080p and having the proper aspect ratio on a 4:3 monitor, but I don't remember how that worked)

And it wouldn't push the hardware harder so to speak... most games hit a wall somewhere regardless, so IF they did support 480p rendering
That's exactly why I commented about user selectable detail levels and actual different rendering modes as one could chose to drop to lower res in favor of higher framerate, let alone the various other detail options (model detail, detail at distance, texture quality, filtering, AA, reflections, shadow, particle effects, etc), the sort of stuff that's been common on PC games since the mid 90s. (It's NOT just useful due to varying system requirements, but useful for catering to different preferences on IDENTICAL machines: some people might prefer playing a game at max settings at 15 fps, while others might prefer dropping the detail to allow 60 fps, etc -even going back to Doom and such, you had people preferrign to have full screen at high detail and low framerate vs dropping to low detail and stepping down the framerate a bit: a shame consoles didn't support flexible detail modes then too for similar preference reasons: especially if the 3DO version had supported low detail mode rather than forcing high detail and only offering screen size options -that could have doubled framerate at any given screen size: the SNES, Jag, and 32x versions forced low detail and a fixed screen size)

Though up to HD support, actual variable resolution modes would have been somewhat limited (namely 320 vs 640 wide -or very close to that- and 240p vs 480i and 480p support later on -though the horizontal res was fully variable on the TV side, so the consoles could do anything their hardware catered to, vertical res is fixed for SDTVs at 240p/480i or 288/576i PAL -less due to typical overscan-), that wouldn't change detail options or variable sceen size or such though: that would still have been possible even with a single fixed resolution. (but in the case of variable res on the N64, there's a notable speed improvement at 320x240 or 320x480 vs 640x480 -might be some 640x240 games too)

If the Consoles are rendering in one resolution ONLY and getting upscaled/downscaled to fit different resolutions, then yeah... it wouldn't be much of a hit = not much of a heat increase, but still a heat increase nonetheless = 'yes', the Hardware is running hotter when upscaling vs. rendering in one resolution and not doing any upscaling.

If the Consoles are capable of rendering in different resolutions, then it's a given that the higher resolution rendered, the more heat is created = 'yes', the Hardware is running hotter in higher resolutions.


It's a 'yes' either way. I think it's funny most believe their hardware is running at the same temperature at 1080P as it would in 480i.

[kool kitty89]

If the Consoles are rendering in one resolution ONLY and getting upscaled/downscaled to fit different resolutions, then yeah... it wouldn't be much of a hit = not much of a heat increase, but still a heat increase nonetheless = 'yes', the Hardware is running hotter when upscaling vs. rendering in one resolution and not doing any upscaling.

If the Consoles are capable of rendering in different resolutions, then it's a given that the higher resolution rendered, the more heat is created = 'yes', the Hardware is running hotter in higher resolutions.


It's a 'yes' either way. I think it's funny most believe their hardware is running at the same temperature at 1080P as it would in 480i.

Huh? What's the facination with heat generation???

The consoles run hot due to the chipsets used, and in the case of the early versions larger chip processes and a good deal of manufacturing defects in the 360. (heat sinks and fans used, odd issue of being forced to use lead free solder, using too small of a case, etc)

Unless you have a system that dynamically clocks the chipset (like laptops tend to do and some newer PCs with settings specifically made for power reduction), the resource intesivity is going to be a non-issue in terms of heat generation, and that was the only case for older PCs (not sure when dynamic clocking became that common outside of laptops -and even for laptops you have high performance modes that don't down clock other than when overheating is approached).
How hot the system gets is more a matter of the components used (console revisions), cooling and ventilation (internal and external issues), and the ambient temperature, of course. (plus, electronics run more efficiently at lower temperatures, so any factors forcing higher temperates to start with can have a bit of a snowball effect on that)

I don't think the PS3 or 360 (or wii) use dynamic clock changes as such other than possibly dropping to idle speeds when in stand by (if not shutting of all major components entirely -just holding data in RAM), and given how hot the wii gets in standby, I think it's more than just idling. (or definitely not shut-off to RAM only)
Otherwise I'd think the 360 would do that when the heat sensor starts registering near overheating rather than a forced shut-down and 2 bar rend ring. (overheat message)

With last gen consoles and PCs up until the last few years at least, I think it was similarly all or nothing with heat dissipation/clock speed. (you had variable fan speeds, drive activity, and such and differing temperatures, but temperature was mainly dependent on ambient conditions and ventilation)


I realized that I missed your original topic comment before (jumped into most of the later discussions and misinterpreted "coolest"), so there's a proper response to that, though I'm sure some are more knowledgible to that in general.


So there's abolutely no advantage of playing a PS3, 360, or Wii (or Xbox for that matter) on an SDTV, though there are trade-offs with using varying HDTVs, monitors, and such.
Though playing them on a good SDTV is not unacceptable by any means: especially with anamorphic display and component inputs, though it gets increasingly weaker with lower quality display mechanisms. Composite is boarderline depending on the TV, S-video is a ton better for luma quality alone (no dot crawl, luminance resolution that should be identical to component video or RGB, though limited color resolution -also varying somewhat on some TVs).

Playing on a crappy 15-20" SDTV with composite or RF and rather poor contrast, etc is pretty rediculous though.
My friend mainly played his 360 on an early 90s 30-32" composite+stereo Trinitron up until last year with the family getting a new trinitron of similar size (still SD, but flat screen CRT, full inputs, anamorphic support, etc) and playing it a few times on my VGA monitor and maybe on an HDTV at his dorm.
The old trinitron probably would have been fine if it hadn't been for the fact that the composite video support was terrible (probably due to age) and there was an odd reddish tinge to the video whcih I couldn't correct with the video settings. There was TERRIBLE chroma bleeding unless you backed way off on the color saturation (at which point stuff starts looking desaturated) and Wii or GC games were rather annoying to play on it due to such. (my 1988 Zenith looks FAR better via composite, let alone S-video -in fact it looks better than a lot of SDTVs I've seen for composite -and RF- a bit better for a lot of that than out ~2004 27" Sanyo CRT)

[gamevet]

There's absolutely no reason they shouldn't have catered to a wide range of resolutions... or rather developers allowed for a wide range of native rendering resolutions, and not just that, but full detail options like with PC games. As it is, that was the case with previous generation consoles to a modest extent. (there was often performance improvements for running in low detail modes for games that did offer high res or added detail -like N64 games supporting high res or some PS2 or Xbox games that had higher rendering resolutions -I think some of those may have been false advertizing though and simple upscaled low res rendering)

My point was that high resolution PC games weren't meant to be scaled down to something like 480i. Crysis won't scale down to 480i resolutions, because it wasn't designed for low-level video cards. Yeah, you can take a game like Oblivion, or Half-Life 2, and scale it down to such resolutions, because those games had lower level video card support, but you can't do that with a game like The Witcher, or Crysis, because the video cards that support those games aren't meant for low-end PC gamers.

[kool kitty89]

My point was that high resolution PC games weren't meant to be scaled down to something like 480i. Crysis won't scale down to 480i resolutions, because it wasn't designed for low-level video cards. Yeah, you can take a game like Oblivion, or Half-Life 2, and scale it down to such resolutions, because those games had lower level video card support, but you can't do that with a game like The Witcher, or Crysis, because the video cards that support those games aren't meant for low-end PC gamers.

Not necessarily low-end either, but just older games in many cases.

In most cases, for SDTV output, the native resolutions supported don't matter: in most cases we were running at 800x600 and using the clone display mode for scaling 800x600 to 480i. (some cases we ran in 1024x768 native too)

However, my point about SDTV support is separate from my argument about flexible detail and resolution options in general. 640x480 on a PC isn't SDTV either... even 320x240 or 320x200 aren't either (save CGA/EGA cards with RF/composite output -or Amiga, Atari ST, etc), and most, if not all PC video cards only offer 480i SDTV output, no 240p stuff, so 240p would get scaled too. (depending on the drivers, it's even more limited than that... Nvidia has an odd tendency from removing features in newer updates)
Plus, even if you use 640x480 on a PC and then take the composite/component/s-video output, you wouldn't get a plain interlaced image even, but 640x480 scaled to 448i (clipped to compensate for overscan), though some drivers allow manual configuration of overscan too. (horizontal resolution is normally fixed at "720" too -14.32 MHz dot clock I assume- thogh scaling/overscan compensation can be modified there too -all though scaling with the same horizontal dot clock, and as such less overscan is lower resolution by definition).
If they did have really flexible SDTV support, there'd be variable dot clocks to reduce (or eliminate) horizontal scaling by the video card (just analog "scaling" -ie higher resolution) and just scale vertically, preferably with 240p support as well.



But a huge point was that it would be awesome if console games had the flexibility of PC counterparts: and I think most 2005/2006 PC releases at least still supported down to 480p (some with varying horizontal res), but beyond resolution (for HDTVS, 480p/540p, 720p, 768p and 1080p would be most important -maybe 1080i native if hardware caters to that, but for anything but CRTs with 1080i native, 720p would be better anyway, or 540p if supported as well -horizontal res varies too, though usually integer based and more so if you have both 4:3 and 16:9 supported) full control over detail options would also be great: allowing the end user to decide what they prefer rather than a fixed default setting by the developers. (and anyone who doesn't care to tinker could stick with the defaults -same with mappable controls)

I've seen several cases where dropping resolution and/or detail would be preferable to some of the framerate issues seen on the PS3/360. (especially if you could do it on and off depending on the part of the game -I used to do that a lot on N64 games with high res mode, with some levels/areas getting too choppy in high res -same for PC too, though a bit less often -except with old DOS games with only 320x200)

Likewise, some Wii games (or last gen consoles too), should have been quite fine in 720p (especially with double wide pixels -same for 540p/1080i/1080p support to some extent -double tall as well in some cases though). It wouldn't really be different from comparable PCs running games at 800x600/1024x768, etc. Granted, you'd have some compromise with other detail levels, and resolution is, again only one facet of graphical detail. (hence why, again, PS3 and 360 games still look far more advanced than DC/PS2/Xbox/Wii games on an SDTV or at 480p, and again, actually rendering in lower resolution can certainly make a game look better -and other compromises with detail)
They could all easily be HD consoles in terms of sheer resolution, but the term "HD" in terms of gaming seems to apply to much, much more than running in native at HDTV resolutions. (otherwise you'd be HD gaming with Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, or Tomb Raider 2 on PC)


As it is, due to simplisitic scaling and lazy use of fixed native resolution, you lose any advantage of running in lower resolution. (otherwise you could have a lot of games running much faster in 480p -480i would limit to effectively 30 fps or 25 fps PAL, or running faster in 720p than 480i, or games able to run at a crisp 768p on the very common 768p HDTVs)
Obviously being able to do that would benefit SDTV, EDTV, or lower res HDTV owners (in the case of dropping lower than 1080p), but the sheer flexibility of variable detail options is awesome. (hell, even with 1080p native rendering, you could have options for direct integer scaling to 960x1080p -which some games do already render in- 960x540 scaled 2x -in which case supporting 540p in 1080i res mode would be very nice, or even dropping to a 4:3 window, or in 720p dropping to 640x720 -or 4:3 window, especially in the case of integer stretched displays, you could still have full res antialiasing/filtering applied too compared to actually rendering to a lower resolution display -iirc the 3DO actually did that, interpolating 320x240 to 640x480i)