1080p or 1366x768 better for 360 gaming?

human_male

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Hi. I wondered if someone could give me some advice on what type of panel and resolution is better for 360 gaming.

The short: Which resolution gives a better picture for 360 games, 1880p or 1366x768?

The long:

I've been using a 1080p LCD monitor and thought it was ok until I played Skyrim. "Where are these amazing graphics?" I asked myself. Then someone reminded me that most games are made in 720p and the monitor has to scale the image up to 1080. So I dragged out my venerable old CRT and set the 360 to 1024x768 and it looks MUCH better. I also tried it on my parents Sony Bravia 32" telly which is also 1080p and that looks good too since tvs scale up the image better than monitors and I'm assuming the games are optimised for tvs.

So I've decided to get a 32" tv for myself and I'm wondering which resolution would be better and give me a better picture for games. Most LCDs are 1080p, and I've been told that's the new standard. But I've noticed these new LED LCDs are 1366x768. I want the tv I buy to be future proof since I'll have it for at least ten years.

So question 1: Which resolution would give me a better picture for my games?

Question 2: Which type of panel would see me into the future (the next generation of consoles and games ect)?

Question 3: Would an LED get rid of that awful silvery appearance in dark areas that you get with an LCD?

Many, many thanks.

Edit: I'd like to add my parents tv and the one I intended to get is the Sony Bravia KDL-32CX520. If anyone happens to have this I'd really appreciate it if you could tell me what you think. It has a lot of features that I don't care about but the picture looked great to me. Picture quality for my games is all I care about.
 
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The short: Which resolution gives a better picture for 360 games, 1880p or 1366x768?

So question 1: Which resolution would give me a better picture for my games?

Question 2: Which type of panel would see me into the future (the next generation of consoles and games ect)?

Question 3: Would an LED get rid of that awful silvery appearance in dark areas that you get with an LCD?

1080p means that the screen's resolution is 1920x1080. That should be better than 1366x768. I doubt that Skyrim on Xbox projects in 1920x1080 given the console's graphical limitations (more likely 720 like you observed), so it shouldn't really look different on either display. It might appear to look better on the other display simply because the screen is smaller (is this the case?).

1. 1080p should give you a better picture for games that support that resolution. Most games on the current generation display at a lower resolution, so you shouldn't see any difference.

2. 1080p.

3. I can't really tell you much about this since I'm not an expert. My hunch says yes. What I can tell you is that LED is the newest type and probably projects the best quality picture.

I've seen one of my friends play Skyrim on his TV and I wasn't really that impressed with how it looked…in fact, I didn't think it looked very good. But playing on my PC, it looks absolutely fabulous! My unsolicited suggestion would be to ditch the 360, forget buying a new TV, and build yourself a computer. You could put one together for close to the same amount you would save on buying a TV that could play 95% of games in 1920x1080, and would look fantastic on your current TV (you can plug your PC right into most modern TV's too).
 
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You want 1080p for Blu-ray movies, but for current console games it's almost totally irrelevant.
 
In my experience you get the best visuals if the native resolution of the TV matches the resolution of the video source (or the other way around). Upsampling never improves the video quality.

As far as the Xbox 360 is concerned, all games are required to at least support 720p. Note however that this is only the output. Internally the game might work with a smaller representation (often used in image ringbuffers to save space and reduce performance requirements) and only upscale it for displaying, which will result in a degraded visual quality compared to a 'real' 720p game (on top of the effects you get when upsampling from 720p to 1080p).
 
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Current games only need 720p. Only very few games actually deliver 1080p, for example Sacred 2.

Blu-Rays offer a native 1080p. They are already cheap and easily available.

The next gen consoles will probably deliver native 1080p too.

So better go for a FullHD TV.
 
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As Mythos said, you get the best results from matching the native resolution - 768 lines isn't 720, so it still doesn't match, but you have less pixels to play with than 1080.

As Gorath said, 1080 is undoubtedly the next standard for consoles, so that will help you get your 10 years.
 
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