PC gaming on HDTV (i.e. Steambox)

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wildside50

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Feb 18, 2012
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My platform of choice for gaming is my PC. I have chosen to pay for a PC that can game at a high level, because gaming is important to me. I paid as much for my GPU alone as a PS4 costs.

Yet if I want to game on my large screen TV, a console seems like the only solution. I simply could not read the text in Tomb Raider on my 1080p TV. Lets take a best case scenario for PC; Steam in Big Screen mode. Yes my PS3/Xbox 360 controller can control most of my needs. Yet most games still have a secondary splash screen that cannot be launched without a mouse and keyboard. Even if the Steambox controller solves that, I am left with games that do not scale well. To whit; the text of my Xbox 360 version of NBA 2k12 is easily readable. The same text on my PC version of NBA 2k14 is very blocky, pixelated, and hard to read on an HDTV.

Is it me? Am I doing something wrong? Or are consoles better suited to HDTV gameplay than a PC, which should be infinately more adjustable. Can I make the Steam menu text, or the NBA 2k14 text less blocky? If not; that's an issue.
 
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This is why PC gamers don't game with HDTVs. The refresh rates on them are terrible compared to computer monitors. Sure, at a solid 25-30 fps on a console, they're fine. But at 40-60fps drawn by a high-end video card, the HDTV cannot keep up. They're designed to play pre-rendered video, kind of like an HD 5450. Gaming on them just doesn't work very well. You get fuzziness, blotchiness and trails. Also remember, 1920x1080 on a huge screen is much less crisp than 1920x1080 on a standard 23" monitor. 1080p was created so that large-format displays like 52" HDTV's wouldn't look awful like the old projection sets did.
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deadlockedworld

deadlockedworld

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I haven't had blockiness issues. Are you sure you are actually running the TV at 1080p? Correct refresh rates, HDMI, etc? The TV should operate just like a cheap low quality monitor.

Keep in mind that your TV, whatever size it is, is still significantly less pixels per inch than your computer - so its understandable that images could be slightly less smooth. (Maybe a 4k TV will fix it! Seems like a good reason to try one.)

Edit: I do have a HTPC running steam big picture and win 8. It works alright with an xbox controller.
 
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wildside50

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Feb 18, 2012
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Here are a couple of (poor I admit) sample pictures of what I'm kinda talking about.

2iu36d.jpg


Here is the menu for NBA2k on Xbox

d90l5.jpg


And here it is on PC. Notice in particular the letters like N and A

2n6ys6p.jpg


You'll have to trust me that in person, it looks far more stark. What is different in the PC version? What am I doing wrong?
 
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Avro Arrow

Avro Arrow

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Nov 12, 2009
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This is why PC gamers don't game with HDTVs. The refresh rates on them are terrible compared to computer monitors. Sure, at a solid 25-30 fps on a console, they're fine. But at 40-60fps drawn by a high-end video card, the HDTV cannot keep up. They're designed to play pre-rendered video, kind of like an HD 5450. Gaming on them just doesn't work very well. You get fuzziness, blotchiness and trails. Also remember, 1920x1080 on a huge screen is much less crisp than 1920x1080 on a standard 23" monitor. 1080p was created so that large-format displays like 52" HDTV's wouldn't look awful like the old projection sets did.
 
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wildside50

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Feb 18, 2012
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That's a nice rant, and I appreciate the input, but if your point is "PC gaming can't work on an HDTV" then WTF is steam doing with it's steambox?

Refresh rates, input lag, and ghosting have nothing to do with why an A @1080p from an Xbox looks smoother than an A @1080p from a pc. That's the question I'm trying to answer.
 
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