Why do consoles look better than PC

[Guest]

I'm wondering why the video quality, not graphical quality looks better from my consoles than my PC does when pumping it through my TV. I've got Nin 64, Playstation 1 and Dreamcast. I've had many older systems like Super NES, NES and even Colecovision and Atari 2600. I've had two video cards with TV-out. The first being Voodoo Rush and my current card being Hercules Geforce DDR-DVI. I have a 50 inch big screen, a 20 inch Mitsubishi and an Amiga 1084 monitor which has the best visual quality for allowing standard video input. On all three of those display units, the video consoles have crisper output and straighter alignment. When I use my PC on any of those 3 displays, the output tends to be washed out, the colors are sometimes at poor intensities, and the biggie the output does not have very good alignment. Often one side is slightly bent. Another downside is the consoles display to fill the entire screen, but my PC will have black borders on all sides. I've tried different resolutions, changing intensity levels, and other little tricks, but I can't really get great output. I've even tried the S-video output, which looks no better than standard RCA. Occasionally I'll find a PC game that does look good on my 50 incher (POD racing looks fantastic, probably because the speed helps blur things). I'm wondering this, also because I might get a DVD-ROM and I'd like the output to fill the full screen of my TV. Also, do the M-PEG cards have better output to TV than my card? And yes, I've heard ATI cards have fantastic TV output, but I'm sticking with Nvidia for now. Just curious if anyone knows anything about this.

 

[rcf84]

Well ATi image quality rocks. Well consules only look better cuz there programming for one thing. The pc you have to look at. CPU = AMD , INTEL ; Video = ATI , NVIDIA , s3 , powerVR. More it take to do and so consules look better. But the Radeon will serve you well Dump the Geforce DDR get a RADEON 64mb DDR. If you dont like return it + there is a 5 year warranty.

Northwood P4 + i845(brookdale)+ 200mhz DDR-SDRAM + ATi Radeon 2 = Dream Team

 

[Guest]

Well, even though the playstation has a 33Mhz processor, and the N64 has a 96, or the dream casts 200, They are not running an operating system, such as the oh-so effecient windows 98, nor do they have 50 differnt ports to identify like: PCI slots, hardrive controlles USB or whatever.

Also, Consoles display at retardedly low resolutions, like 320 x 240(interlaced) or 512x384(interlaced) and on modern systems 640 x 480(interlaced also). and all of these are at 30hz. your computer runs at 1024 x 768 to 640 x 480 and those are usually from 85 hertz and up, not interlaced. so right off the bat the computer has to do well over 5 times the amount of work. Just because its also running ather programs in the background (windows 98, Windows explorer, and any other programs you might have running; Napster, AIM, ICQ, any download accelerator, norton antivirus ect.) and also, It has to run these games at a pixel clock about 5 times higher.

Your Game machine, however, Is built for one thing: Games. And up until recently, games have had no operating systems what so ever. And modern systems operating systems are EXTREMELY stripped down, used for only identifing ports, or interpreting internet data and what not.

Also, on top of all of this, your computers processor is not designed to draw up polygons, wrap textures, or shade pixles, or whatever else the program calls for. Your computers processor Is designed for compatibilty and multitasking. running programs. Consoles processors are Geometry enginges. And are only meant for doing one thing at a time: games. If it were possible to get windows 98 to work on a playstation 2 or a dreamcast, It would take a good half a day to boot up.

And for one last thing. Your TV is a large fuzzy monitor. Its designed to make jagged edges unappartent and drasticly increase color saturation. Try running windows 98 on a TV out, you cant read jack. And vise-versa if you try to watch TV on a computer monitor; it looks awful. Because Computer monitors are made to bring out every little detail, so you can read text at 1024 x 768. or higher, depending on your monitor.

 

[HolyGrenade]

DVD Output from my DXR3 Decoder Card looks pretty good on tv. Anyway, Try getting a matrox card to output RGB signal through to the scart sockets of your tv (If it has one). You will see the Damn Fine Quality a computer Graphics card can produce on a TV.

Much better than a n64 or psx/2 trying to display through s-video.


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