Make decisions for HP (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, November 11, 2013, 20:28 (4029 days ago) @ kapowaz
edited by uberfoop, Monday, November 11, 2013, 20:42

[citation needed]

Well, I was probably being hyperbolic by suggesting that a substantial number of people with 50" screens game at 6' or less.

However...

Not sure about any terribly scientific studies, but conversations around the internet seem to suggest that 12' is quite on the high side. For instance, here's a thread I saw a year ago on GAF regarding the subject. Not a huge sample size, but if you compile all the responses that people offered regarding actual television sets, it looks like this (I took the middle of the range for people who gave a range over which they sit):

And the person at 12 feet? That was the OP, who was saying that it felt awkward to sit so far from the TV.

Other places on NeoGAF seem to give similar results. There are annual threads where people post images of their setups... a lot of the posts don't give a very complete picture of the rooms, but of those that do, far less than half the posts demonstrate what looks like a TV viewing distance of more than 12'. And of the ones that even let you sit that far back given the furniture placement, some look like the sort of setup where you'd sit on the edge of the couch (and thus actually game at ~10').

My own experiences tend to agree with the NeoGAF's visible distribution. I usually game at 6'-10' on a 37" screen depending on how I feel and what I'm playing. And of my friends whose viewing distances I can recall off the top of my head, most sit in the ballpark of 6'-8' from their HDTVs.

I suppose it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and that the various populations I've sampled from have all been skewed in the same direction, or that my sample sets are too small, etc... but I'd be extremely suprised if I was wrong about the basic claim that most console gamers play at <12'.

Xenos:

Personally I set about 12' from a 60" TV and while I can tell a difference between 720p and 1080p it's not such a big difference that I feel slighted with 720p. In fact all my blu-ray rips are ripped at 720p because the better quality isn't worth the extra HDD space in my opinion.

If we assume that distance/(screen diagonal) is a more reasonable basis than raw viewing distance (which it is to an extent), you're not an outlier. You do have an above-average TV diagonal, however. The same ratio would put me 7.4' from my TV, which is on the lower half of the distances I use.

Your blu-ray example sucks, though. The real world has a lot of photons flying about, and the result is that live-action footage has nearly perfect supersample antialiasing. Ditto for CGI; it doesn't have to render in real-time. So even if the video is encoded at 1080p, it might have been rendered at some cartoonishly high resolution like 15360x8640.

This is why I brought up the importance of supersampling in the low-resolution TV discussion. Even if higher resolutions won't make the images much sharper on a 720 TV (or when playing on a 1080p TV from a large viewing distance), it will make them more stable. When you compare a 720p encoding of a film versus a 1080p encoding of a film, your only limitation is the raw crispness/sharpness. The discrepency in raw crispness/sharpness is going to become less prominant very quickly with distance. Even 480p DVDs, relatively blurry and poor in colour quality, manage to avoid aliasing. Yet at 720p, thin geometric details and tron lines in Halo 4 alias and shimmer like crazy.

And that sort of shimmering isn't something that disappears at a low distance. One day I decided to try and see if it were possible to sit far enough from the TV that Halo 3's specular aliasing wasn't obvious. Soon enough I hit the back wall of my house, fifty-three feet away. The game was unplayably hard to make out at that distance, but I could still see those artifacty thin highlights crawling and shimmering just fine. Higher resolutions help to mitigate that sort of thing.

I would argue that conflating a given resolution in film encoding with a native game resolution is a common form of unintentional (or sometimes intentional, if you're deliberately misleading people) equivocation.