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Gaming in XHD: HDTV Wishes it Looked This Good
It’s amazing how you can’t go back when it comes to television or monitor size. In the 1980’s, a 19” TV was a good size, and 13” was more the norm. A good pair of pliers to change the channel on those TVs was essential too, but I digress.
I remember in 1992 when I broke the bank to get a new 32” TV. As I gazed at my gigantic new purchase, I couldn’t fathom how people managed to survive with a microscopic 19” TV. I’d moved on, and my standard had been raised. Then in the mid-90’s I purchased a 52” rear projection TV. Now we’re talking the right size for a picture! Those cavemen with 32” sets just didn’t know what they were missing! Except the picture was starting to get a bit soft and fuzzy… I needed something better than 480 lines of interlaced picture data. My journey to the Dark Side of endless Home Theater upgrades had begun. A dozen years, a few front projection systems and a few video scalers later… my standards for good picture quality are now hopelessly out of whack. I’m a Home Theater Sith. My point being, it takes a lot to impress me with picture quality these days.
With PC monitors, for years resolution has been a step or three ahead of what was practical to use on the monitor sizes available. With good CRT monitors, you could send them a resolution so high you’d need a magnifying glass to see your icons. And trying to run a game at those high resolutions, at a framerate that wouldn’t make your corneas bleed, was the challenge Falcon Northwest was created for. The phrase “CPU limited” hadn’t even entered the vernacular until the last few years– graphics cards just could never keep up. All of this has changed recently.
With the development time of the toughest game engines dragging on for years longer than they used to, and the massive leap SLI provided, suddenly DOOM 3 just wasn’t as scary as we all thought it would be. (I’m speaking hardware requirement-wise. I still have cola in my keyboard from the first time that demon broke through the stairs to get at me). When you can run the most demanding title out there on your 19” 1280x1024 LCD with all the details maxed – you’re happy. You’ve just achieved a game at a smooth framerate at the same resolution as the highest end HDTV! But for the true enthusiast… it’s the struggle to achieve ever greater performance that’s the real reward. Whenever the games have pushed your hardware – you’ve pushed back. But for enthusiasts, deep down you want games that look so good they need new hardware. Is this the end of your hobby then? Where’s your next hardware fix if
you can get 60+ FPS on your 19” LCD?
Enter XHD
Last summer I made a purchase that I did not fully understand the ramifications of at the time: a 30-inch Apple Cinema Display. Yes, I will even explore Apple in search of better gaming! I’d heard raves about this (then $3,300) monitor, and the first PC based graphics card that could drive it had just shipped: the Nvidia 7800 GTX 512 meg edition. It had the new “Dual-Link DVI” port needed to drive this 2560x1600 pixel display.
Let me say that again: 2560x1600 pixel display. If you’re having trouble imagining this, you’re not alone. The numbers sound intriguing but hard to envision. The reality is absolutely drool-inducing. I want to tell everyone how cool this is, but here’s my dilemma: a picture is worth 1,000 words, right? So I’d like to show you what 2560x1600 resolution looks like with the screen shots below. The problem is if you’re running at anything less than 2560x1600 resolution on your monitor, you can only see part of the pictures, and you’ll have to scroll around to even get the idea of what this might look like 30” wide in front of you. When you open these, if your browser squishes them to fit on the page, make sure you hover over them and click 1:1 size.
FarCry |
Oblivion |
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This is 2560x1600 resolution. This is double the pixel count that the newest, highest resolution (1920x1080p) HDTVs have to offer. Technically, this resolution has been dubbed “WQXGA”, but neither of the two companies actually making displays at this resolution have picked up this crap term. They just call it “2560x1600”. Good, but also a mouthful. Normally I hate marketing-speak, but I think Nvidia’s got a great name for this: XHD. “Extreme High Definition”.
Immerse Yourself
At 2560x1600 resolution, you can see every individual blade of grass. At 30” wide, it fills your peripheral vision. You feel like you’re in the jungle. You can almost feel the cold stones of the dungeons. It’s an unbelievably immersive experience. This isn’t the slightly fuzzy immersion of a big screen TV – this is a crystal clear, shockingly sharp window into another world.
“Don’t you have to sit far back with a display that big?” people ask. If it were a TV, then yes, because usually even an HDTV’s pixel structure is not as dense as a 2560x1600 monitor. On most flatscreen TVs if you sit too close you’ll get the “screen door effect”, where you can see the black lines in between each pixel. On CRT TVs the effect is even worse, and you’ll see the black scan lines and the black in between the dots of phosphors.
XHD is different. It’s just like looking at the best 19 or 20” LCD monitors out there – only there’s just more of it to look at. You’ll actually look up, down, left and right – just to see everything in your game’s field of view. Seeing an XHD display from a distance, it may not look too much different from an HDTV – it’s getting up close at normal desk viewing range that you’ll truly understand why gaming in XHD is different. The first time I booted up Far Cry in XHD on my Cinema Display, I told my friends I’d just had a religious experience. Gaming in XHD is just epic.
But XHD displays have a drawback: like all LCD monitors, they really only look crisp and sharp at their native resolution. In practical terms, this means that if you run even “regular” high resolutions like 1600x1200 on your 30” XHD display, it’s going to be scaled up and look soft. Not only does it get scaled up, it also gets stretched to widescreen if your game doesn’t support it. The end result is that once you become spoiled rotten too with your own 30” XHD display, 2560x1600 is your new resolution. More and more games are supporting 2560x1600 natively all the time, and they will spoil you. You can’t go back to 1024x768, and you’re ruined for lesser monitors. It’d be like trying to watch that 13” TV from the 1980’s. Welcome to the Dark Side of enthusiast PCs.
And there’s a catch: driving 4,096,000 pixels takes serious PC speed. No, it takes ludicrous speed. XHD is the new frontier, and the hardware to actually drive this resolution at a decent framerate is just now becoming available. Realistically, you’ll need at least two 7900GTX cards in SLI to drive an XHD panel at a decent framerate on most newer titles.
Many people think Nvidia’s new Quad-SLI technology just means 4 graphics cards, and that must automatically be faster than two graphics cards in standard SLI. Not so. Quad-SLI is a very different, very beastly card set that has but one true purpose: XHD. Sure, it’ll give you a bit of a boost at 1600x1200 resolution, and 1920x1200 is where it starts to seriously take over. But it’s 2560x1600 resolution, with all the details cranked up, where Quad just starts to go stupidly faster than any other hardware out there. Quad was made to run XHD, and watching a great game run liquid-smooth at 2560 is a sight to behold.
The other catch: a full XHD capable setup, including a 30” display and Quad-SLI in a PC with enough horsepower not to hold it back can easily run $6-$8K, or even more. It’s not for everyone. It’s not even for every enthusiast. But the bleeding edge has always been the playground of the early adopters willing to risk big bucks for the Next Big Thing. And there’s hope that XHD won’t always be stratospherically priced. Prices on the Apple Cinema Display have come down dramatically in the past year, and the future should bring more competition to this monitor segment as more people pick up the new graphics cards capable of running them. For the near future though, there’s no denying XHD will be a very expensive thrill.
A Light in the Console Fog
There’s one last reason I’m so bullish on XHD. It keeps PC gaming where it’s always been: one level above the consoles. Consoles used to have a built-in limiter that kept them well under the capabilities of PC gaming: 480 interlaced lines of TV resolution. Now, with HDTV capable Xbox 360’s, and more hi-res consoles on the way, PC Gaming needs keep offering resolutions that consoles just can’t. In the battle of resolutions, XHD is actually more than 2 million pixels ahead. In a gaming hardware industry that’s now under fire from its own console offspring, XHD might just be its best hope. |
