What is ANA? It’s Microsoft’s ace in the hole, their secret weapon that makes the Xbox 360 graphically look better today than Playstation 3.
ANA is a chip that does nothing but figure out how to display your game at top quality no matter what your dash display settings are or what your TV can do… she is a scaling chip.
Ben Kuchera from arstechnica.com sat down with Microsoft, an HDTV, a Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 to be shown why ANA is so important in the Xbox 360’s design.
ANA was designed along side the GPU so they work flawlessly together. So with the hardware solution, the Xbox 360 can re-res your game up or down from its native rendering (which in most cases is 720p). The Playstation 3 however can’t go up, only down. So a 720p native game can only display at 720p, 540p or 480p at the moment. There’s some speculation that with a lot of software talent, Sony could maybe create a software scaling solution, but software solutions are never as fast as hardware. Given that 720p is by far the most commonly found HDTV resolution, most games probably in this generation of systems are going to be rendered at 720p with a few blockbuster exceptions here and there.
First up was Resistance vs Gears. In the Bravia control panel, the TV displayed it’s resolution at 720p for Resistance but it showed Gears had been upscaled to a full 1080p. Ben noted that Gears was graphically superior to Resistance.
Then they moved on to Call of Duty 3 which is a cross platform release. The Playstation 3 ran Call of Duty in 720p while the Xbox 360 and ANA upscaled it to 1080p. Even though Microsoft tried to point out the smallest differences which should make the game better on their system, Ben admitted he didn’t see much of a difference. An interesting site note is that COD3, at least for the Xbox360, isn’t rendered at 720p, it’s rendered at 620p. In fact if the Xbox 360 upscaled the game from 540p to 1080p and it still looked as good as the Playstation 3’s 720p rendering, that speaks volumes for how good ANA does her job.
The conclusion seems to be that cross platform games are probably going to be a wash graphically. Where we’ll see the platforms shine is with their exclusive content. Unfortunately for Sony, they’re loosing a lot of their exclusives and Microsoft will always be a generation of game development ahead of the Playstation 3 potentially always having better looking exclusives.
More Information on Ana
ANA is a chip that does nothing but figure out how to display your game at top quality no matter what your dash display settings are or what your TV can do… she is a scaling chip.
Ben Kuchera from arstechnica.com sat down with Microsoft, an HDTV, a Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 to be shown why ANA is so important in the Xbox 360’s design.
First Some Backgroud
Why is having a hardware scaling solution such a big deal? Well if you don’t have one, you can only go down in resolution, not up. So a game made in 720p can only scale down to 480p, leaving 1080p or 1080i with no image. HDTV’s vary a lot in terms of resolution and today’s HDTV’s come with more jacks and resolution support than the earlier generation HDTV’s. So essentially all the HDTV variations present a compatibility problem. Microsoft’s solution to the problem was component cables, because every HDTV has component inputs. ANA was then created to take advantage of any and all resolutions for the last, this or next generation HDTV displays. Sony on the other hand chose to embrace only the newest technology which includes HDMI, the only audio/video connector found on the Playstation 3 and in Sony's defence, the Xbox 360 as of right now does not support this next generation digital audio/video port.ANA was designed along side the GPU so they work flawlessly together. So with the hardware solution, the Xbox 360 can re-res your game up or down from its native rendering (which in most cases is 720p). The Playstation 3 however can’t go up, only down. So a 720p native game can only display at 720p, 540p or 480p at the moment. There’s some speculation that with a lot of software talent, Sony could maybe create a software scaling solution, but software solutions are never as fast as hardware. Given that 720p is by far the most commonly found HDTV resolution, most games probably in this generation of systems are going to be rendered at 720p with a few blockbuster exceptions here and there.
The Demo
Microsoft demoed some games for Ben to demonstrate the difference on a Sony Bravia HDTV capable of 1080p.First up was Resistance vs Gears. In the Bravia control panel, the TV displayed it’s resolution at 720p for Resistance but it showed Gears had been upscaled to a full 1080p. Ben noted that Gears was graphically superior to Resistance.
Then they moved on to Call of Duty 3 which is a cross platform release. The Playstation 3 ran Call of Duty in 720p while the Xbox 360 and ANA upscaled it to 1080p. Even though Microsoft tried to point out the smallest differences which should make the game better on their system, Ben admitted he didn’t see much of a difference. An interesting site note is that COD3, at least for the Xbox360, isn’t rendered at 720p, it’s rendered at 620p. In fact if the Xbox 360 upscaled the game from 540p to 1080p and it still looked as good as the Playstation 3’s 720p rendering, that speaks volumes for how good ANA does her job.
The conclusion seems to be that cross platform games are probably going to be a wash graphically. Where we’ll see the platforms shine is with their exclusive content. Unfortunately for Sony, they’re loosing a lot of their exclusives and Microsoft will always be a generation of game development ahead of the Playstation 3 potentially always having better looking exclusives.
More Information on Ana
