I fear that the HD future still might not be HD

We have new consoles coming out in a few months! This is a cause for celebration no mater what type of games you play on whatever platform you prefer.

The main gain is that it moves the state of play for what we still insist on calling AAA games from 512mb up to 5gb of memory, and this is massive win for gamers everywhere. Even the PC gets a massive push as the basic game designs will expand and then the other 10gb of memory we have on our PCs over that initial 5 can be used for stupidly high resolution textures and the like. Happy times for all.

I do have a worry about the consoles, and it’s one that comes from the sad reality of the 360 and PS3: the stated resolution for a game is most likely utter bollocks.

A common practice with console games is to render the game at sub 720p resolution and then scale it up so that it fits. This means that you might have SD content that has only gone through a scaling process and so, and I’m sure everybody has seen this, looks so jagged it’s painful. The reason for this was that the hardware in the consoles just wasn’t powerful enough to do what they wanted to do at the proper resolution.

This is of course the point where PC owners get to be smug as a new graphics card has always been seen as the solution to the problem there rather than upscaling. This is mainly due, I suspect, to the fact that it’s easier and cheaper to just make it the PC gamer’s problem of running games as intended and, generally, PC gamers are happy to have that responsibility to keep their rigs up to speed.

I should of course say at this point that we are so far away from seeing final games on these consoles that this is all speculation, but I suspect that we’re destined for a repeat of last generation in this matter anyway, especially when it comes to the Xbox as it lags behind the PS4 on paper, much like the PS3 lagged behind the 360 for most of the generation.