syphon00

maybe this is not much of an issue on XBOX since most of its games are in Dolby Digital but isn't PS2 doing the same thing
why does it have an optical port when most of the game will only pass analog singals. I just think developers are lazy bastards or that they don't wanna pay royalties to Dolby. The same thing with progressive scan on PS2, it's capable of processing it
so why not make more games that support it. DD and progressive scan are the reason I would get the xbox version of the game if it's also released on PS2.

Aghama

The PS2 has an optical port mainly because it plays DVDs.

I'm pretty sure progressive scan & DD5.1 support are not native to the PS2. EA came up with a way to do DD5.1 (and I think progressive scan too), but I would hazard a guess that since it's in software the performance takes a hit. Plus the method is probably proprietary to EA.

Liver&Onions

I thought this was a list of DD games.

syphon00

here's list

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htfo...hreadid=100055

saying that DD and progressive is not native to PS2 isn't true
because all that is create through the game and has nothing to do with PS2 hardware. I'm pretty sure PS2 don't have builtin DD decoder but that doesn't matter as longer as your reciever has it
so there really is no excuse for the developer to not implement this in their games

Aghama

There's a huge difference between DD for movies and for games. For a movie, everything is already encoded and the receiver just has to translate it. For games, 5.1 channels of audio have to be created & encoded on the fly, as opposed to 2 channels for stereo or pro logic. The equates to more processor time, and a performance hit.

Liver&Onions

I haven't seen much, if any, of a performance hit on my xbox.

Damn. Not even a week into ownership and I am already in fanboy mode. I better calm down.

Aghama

I didn't mean to imply that you're going to see it, it's most likely already been factored into the game already. It might mean a few less polys or something.

I'm not claiming to have any hard numbers on how much processing it takes, I'm just trying to give some guesses as to why more developers don't support it. I'd be willing to bet the main reason that progressive scan it's more widely supported is that most consumers don't even know what it is, much less have the capability for it.

Liver&Onions

I read something by factor 5 who said that doing actual DD5.1 would introduce a slight lag in the sound, like milliseconds which sometimes could be heard by the players... So that could be the performance hit you are talking about.

Drexl

The XBox can do real DD 5.1 because it has special hardware that the other systems don't have-the Dolby Interactive Content Encoder.