Why 1080p?

Awakening

I don't see why Ouya, with it's limited hardware, renders to 1080p. I have serious problems with fillrate. From what little I know, that's not Tegra 3's strongest points. 720p have 56% less pixels and would mean a speed boost for Ouya, while still looking pretty damn good. Actually, the additional speed means games could look even better.

Ayrik

You can just change your frame buffer to 720 (or whatever you want to) for now. But, they are working on it.

madmax2069

Can't you just run the game internally at a lower resolution and scale the output up to 1080p, which is what I think is done with a few games. That way you don't hit the fill rate as easily.

Shush

You can set the frame buffer to any resolution you like, the Tegra 3 chipset then hardware scales that for you to 1080p, (or whatever the native resolution of your TV is). I haven't been able to determine how much of a hit this scaling is, (it does seem to be extremely efficient), but it is invisible to your code and is an absolute requirement.

I use 960*540, that's the point of most efficiency in terms of frame rate and memory bandwidth/fill rate usage for our current title/engine.

Awakening

Thanks for the advice :)

I am using App Game Kit so I can't do this myself. But I will talk to the developers about supporting this.

zezba9000

In Unity I set the game to run in 720 upscale.  Runs about twice as fast.

I agree, the hardware in the Ouya can't handle 1080 for a lot of games.

A 720p only console would have been fine with me.

GrenadeGames

Some Next-Gen games won't even handle 1080p...... :(

Awakening

1080p at 60FPS is quite uncommon outside of PC gaming.

On the AGK frame buffer thing: Can be altered "manually" when you compile your own APK. But I don't have Eclipse set up for compiling the latest version of AGK. And was hoping to avoid Eclipse completely since they offer a much easier way to do it now.

ArcadEd

I put in my vote for a 720p console as well.  I just dont' really see the need for 1080p.

Killa_Maaki

Here's my thought on the subject.

They went 1080p because, for one, the Tegra3 already handles that pretty much automatically AFAIK. For another, developers can just downscale their framebuffer with almost no work at all (in Unity it's a simple one-liner, Screen.SetResolution). It gives developers a choice - some 2D games will work perfectly fine at 1080p, for example, whereas a lot of 3D games might go down to 720p or even as low as 480p for the more fillrate-demanding games.

Puzzl

Why not 1080p? Up to devs to decide what they are capable of - with time they'll learn how to push even more OUYA's internals.

Magnesus

My game works fine at 1080p, so why not use it? Althought it would have more FPS at 720p so I'm considering giving users an option in menu (at 1080p I lock FPS at 30 because it was between 30-40 while at 720p it should be able to run at 60FPS just fine) - my game is The Lost Heroes (although the version that is currently in the store runs worse because I made it before I had OUYA, newer version awaits review and will be available probably this week with improved graphics and everything).

Ayrik

When your 720p TV accepts the 1080p signal and downscales the picture it looks horrible, especially when you set your frame buffer to 720 and OUYA upscales it to 1080p and the TV downscales it back....ugh. That's why we need the option to change the signal resolution. This has been discussed so many times already.

Please let the players choose the resolution that matches their TV, or even better, detect it via HDMI if you can, and still give the players the option so games like Ravensword run better.

Killa_Maaki

Ayrik said:

When your 720p TV accepts the 1080p signal and downscales the picture it looks horrible, especially when you set your frame buffer to 720 and OUYA upscales it to 1080p and the TV downscales it back....ugh. That's why we need the option to change the signal resolution. This has been discussed so many times already.

Please let the players choose the resolution that matches their TV, or even better, detect it via HDMI if you can, and still give the players the option so games like Ravensword run better.

That's what they're already doing. The OUYA can't detect that the TV is going to downscale it, all the OUYA knows is what the TV will accept. The TV may very well accept a 1080p signal, and it may very well report that it accepts a 1080p signal, but downscales it to 720p (in which case, that's a pretty shoddy TV but that's beside the point) and there's nothing OUYA can do without user input.
So yeah, would be nice to have the option in case your TV incorrectly reports 1080p support (honestly, why on earth would a TV manufacturer do such a thing...? seems shady)

Ayrik

Actually, no. HDMI also reports the native resolution, and I'd prefer that be used 100% of the time, personally.

Killa_Maaki

Ayrik said:

Actually, no. HDMI also reports the native resolution, and I'd prefer that be used 100% of the time, personally.

Well jeez - make a liar out of me, why don'cha?

Ayrik

Sorry. I love all OUYA supporters and developers, I promise!