Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 28 Mar 2007 08:28
by Jedah » 28 Mar 2007 12:44
by bullethell » 28 Mar 2007 15:30
by zak » 28 Mar 2007 23:38
by dementia » 02 Apr 2007 17:56
by Ex Omni » 01 May 2007 16:01
by El Chaos » 16 Oct 2009 23:46
by El Chaos » 14 Jun 2010 23:52
by zinger » 28 Oct 2010 17:23
by El Chaos » 01 Nov 2010 12:01
by Victory » 06 Nov 2010 13:50
by icycalm » 06 Nov 2010 23:27
by icycalm » 01 Dec 2011 11:58
by El Chaos » 02 Dec 2011 20:46
by icycalm » 19 Oct 2012 21:52
iMoses wrote:Settings
System
Console Settings
System Info
LT, RT, X, Y, LB, RB, X, X, X, X
Natalie Shoemaker wrote:So what can you do to stop your discarded system from turning over your entire life savings? Well, there’s not much you can do if you’ve already traded it in. However, for those that haven’t yet there’s something you can do to wipe your drive. Detach the hard drive from the Xbox 360, hook it up to your computer, and use Darik’s Boot and Nuke. This program will delete any contents on the drive it can detect. Or you can always complain to Microsoft to create a better factory restore program.
by icycalm » 11 Jun 2013 01:05
Audrey Drake wrote:Microsoft has announced a new model of the Xbox 360. It is smaller, sleeker, and quieter than the prior "slim" model. It's available starting today in the United States, UK, Canada and Australia, with more territories coming soon, according to Microsoft.
Pricing for the slimmed down model will be the same as the older model, with a 4GB (no Kinect) edition running $199.99 and a 250GB model priced at $299.99. A 4GB system that includes the Kinect will cost $299.99.
Audrey Drake wrote:The company will also bring two games per month, free of charge, to Xbox Live Gold members. The first game is Fable III, available now. July's two games are scheduled to be Assassin's Creed 2 and Halo 3. Additionally, it was announced that "hundreds" of games are still on the way for Xbox 360.
by icycalm » 28 Jan 2014 00:38
RayMaker wrote:Why didnt people complain about the ''crushed blacks'' on the 360
A lot of 360 games were darker,had more vibrant colors and the ps3 games were lighter.Like the situation with the x1 and PS4, but people praised the 360's superior colors and blacks. Isnt a result of the different API's? why the sudden shift?
by El Chaos » 28 Jan 2014 22:19
Richard Leadbetter wrote:There has long been debate around our Face-Off screenshots which show darker, richer colours on the Xbox 360 versions of many games. The lushness of the images tends to make the PlayStation 3 shots look washed out in comparison, and there are still the occasional suggestions that we're running the PS3 games in limited-range RGB mode (we've been full-range RGB since the year dot, even though most HDMI capture cards still don't work with it properly).
Accurate screenshot exports on 360 aren't quite so common, but thankfully Microsoft kit out journalists with a tool from the XDK development kit that allows us to FTP into debug consoles and test kits and - yes - dump video RAM for screenshot purposes. Sony isn't quite so forthcoming with its own equivalent (ProDG's Target Manager) alas.
It's worth pointing out that you are still getting the pin-point precision that HDMI offers, but getting the right colour balance is going to require some pretty nifty display-side tweaking. There is the danger that the ramped up gamma will produce black crush style artifacting that strips away some element of image definition. The accuracy of our frame-rate analysis tools is not affected, however.
The Xbox 360 does process internally at 10-bit component and you can see some dithering artifacts if you look closely enough at the pixel level. And of course the Xbox 360 started out without any support for HDMI at all - it wasn't introduced until the Zephyr model that debuted in the form of the Xbox 360 Elite. Beforehand, the best output you could get was analogue component or VGA. Could this bizarre gamma shift be a bug within the new HANA controller that replaced the previous, analogue-only ANA chip?
Well, a comparison of component up against the framebuffer suggests the issue is not related just to the 360's HDMI output. While the scale of the gamma shift is different, it's still clearly not the right colour balance, whether you're using analogue component or the HDMI interface's YPbPr digital component alternative.
Quite why this happens is something we were uncertain about before a kindly developer clued us in. From what we've learned this week, it appears that this ramping up of the gamma is actually deliberate on Microsoft's part. The actual reason it is in place on the Xbox 360 is because Microsoft believe that it looks better on the average TV. Bearing in mind the breadth of displays available and how they are typically so badly calibrated when you buy them (brightness and contrast are often ramped up in order to make them stand out on the shop floor), we can't help but think that this is a call that the developer should make.
Developers are made aware of the gamma conversion, and Microsoft provide an exact table of the transformation so it can be reversed should developers wish to factor it out while they build the framebuffer - but with the black crush we see on occasion, we can only wonder if this is a 100 per cent non-destructive process. However, the fact that this option is there means that the issue probably can't be changed with a firmware update, as the chances are that "corrected" games will then look very strange indeed. Properly calibrated games like Burnout Paradise for example will no longer be displayed correctly.
Going back to our Face-Off comparison shots, the fact that people automatically assume that it is the PS3 game that is "washed out" as opposed to the 360 version having the gamma arbitrarily adjusted suggests that perhaps Microsoft has it right, that maybe the image is more pleasing to the human eye.
Update: An interesting email from a key multiplatform developer this morning corroborates the fact that 360 operates internally in component, the REC.709 standard to be precise, and this contact suggests that in theory it is the correct way to address an HDTV, though in practise sticking to RGB in the way that PS3 and PC do is more developer-friendly. He also suggests that the richer colour we see in 360 Face-Off shots might be explained in some cases because so much development is 360-led: calibration takes place on 360 and isn't corrected on PS3, resulting in the "washed out" look. However, even factoring in the REC.709 component standard, this developer also believes that 360 HDMI output does require adjustment.
Regardless, there does appear to be something rather odd going on here - what is the purpose of the reference levels? Displays operate either at limited RGB (360's "standard") or full-range RGB ("expanded" on the dash) so you do have to wonder quite why there is an "intermediate" setting at all when to the best of our knowledge there is no hardware that supports it. The intermediate setting does tone back the gamma effect a little, but this setting definitely isn't operating with full-range RGB so the gamut of available colours is lower.