Why are most games on the PS3 only in 720p or 1080i?

May be...

I was going to get condemned 2 and rainbow six on the ps3 but they werent 1080p like the xbox versions. Is it harder to program on the blu ray discs or somthing? When are more games going to be in 1080p for the ps3?

The PS3 supports true 720p and 1080p. There is no hardware scaler in the system. The reason why some games are only 720p is because some developers made concessions in order to have acceptable frame rates and special effects (like AntiAliasing). When you get to 1080p material, there's over twice as many pixels as 720p. That means the graphics processing that would have gone to dynamic lighting or antialiasing is now pushing pixels.



More 1080p games should be coming out soon

It's up to the developers to make a game 1080p or not. 720p for me is good enough. I doubt that a 3rd party developer or a PS3 non-exclusive game will ever run at 1080p on the PS3. It's a lot easier to program for the 360 and developers can make a game run at 1080p easily.



I guess if I had a 1080p HDTV I would care more about PS3 games being in 1080p probably, but I only have a 720p HDTV that can output 1080i. When the Xbox 360 version has 1080p is only upscaled anyways and it's not "true HD", like Blu-Ray on the PS3 so it doesn't matter that much.



The only upcoming PS3 games coming this year that I know of that will be 1080p are: Gran Tursimo 5 Prologue and Gran Turismo 5 (the full version).



God of War 3 and Wardevil: Enigma will also be 1080p, but they aren't coming until early next year. Other than that, that's all I know of.

There are a lot of games that are 1080p by default on the ps3, a few that come to mind is Tekken 5 Dark ressurection, everyday shooter and others, and the 360 does not have 1080p games, it upscales games to 1080 but does not support it by default, there is a difference, i know that Gran Turismo 5: prologue is also in 1080p

ps3 sucks i waited in line for 3 days and even got frost bite only to take it back because my xbox 360 is ten times better

Like the first response said, the 360 has "fake HD" whereby everything is at resolutions less than 720p, and is upscaled by the hardware to either 720p or 1080p. Halo 3, for example, runs in 600p (Beyond3d forums). The PS3 must render everything natively, so when you're talking about over 2x as many pixels in 1080, developers have to make concessions as far as where the graphics power that they know how to access is put. Obviously not every developer can squeeze every bit of the graphics power out, it's just a difference in budgets/time for each game. Resistance 2, for example, is using everything Insomniac learned during the making of Resistance 1 and Rachet & Clank. Insomniac's method is to take what you learn while making a game and apply that to the next, instead of going back and redoing what you already have (thus delaying game launches).



And it's not a matter of programming on the Bluray discs, as you put it. It's like saying you're programming for a 3.5" floppy or a CD. It's simply a storage medium, more space = more possibilities to work with.



More 1080p games are going to be released probably in 2nd and 3rd generation games, as developers get the hang of the Cell/RSX combo. Most programmers aren't used to using the CPU to calculate graphics to then send off to the GPU, and that sort of thinking is leading to sub-par quality on the PS3 (See Madden 08). EA tried to push the square peg in the round hole with that game, so to speak, when they tried to port the 360 version to the PS3.



You really sound like a fanboy when you say "If MGS is 720p, I'm going to get an Xbox." MGS is one hell of a game. It's pushing 50gb of content. Even if the game plays like crap (which I doubt), Kojima is one crazy developer to put that much stuff into a game. [Disclaimer: I haven't ever played a MGS game. Shun me if you will.]



What difference does it make to you if a single game is 720p versus 1080p native? If you don't have a 1080p set, you can't tell the difference. If you have a 720p set, native 1080p might actually look worse if your TV has a terrible scaler built in.



Yes that's right. Regardless of the input source, your TV upscales or downscales to the native resolution. So you can turn on a 480i SNES game and it will play at 1080p on a 1080p TV. It will just look like crap though. If you put a 1080p source on a 720p set, the set will downscale to display 720p. Thus you've just lost half your data. In that case, it's worthless to have 1080p native resolution.



1080p downscaled to 720p is worse than 720p native displayed on the same 720p set. Not to say that the quality isn't bad, it's just that there is quality loss there, regardless of whether or not you can tell. Likewise, an upconversion from 720p to 1080p isn't that bad. There might be some pixelated lines, but nothing you can't get over. It's worse when you make a bigger jump like 600p to 1080p. There will be more pronounced pixelation than 720p to 1080p.



So the lesson to take home from this is that even though 1 box says 1080p, and the other one doesn't, on the PS3 version it just means it's not natively displayed in 1080p, but then again, neither is the Xbox 360 version (except in very rare cases, like Virtua Fighter, which is 1080p native on PS3 and 360. It was a PS3 port to the 360.). If you really have a 1080p set, it's just a matter of which does the upscaling, your TV or the game system.



If you only have a 720p set, you won't be able to tell the difference unless you nitpick that thing to death.