Does inputting a 720p hdmi signal to a 1080p tv lag?

[GradualGames]

I saw a comment today which surprised me. Someone asserted the AVS is going to be laggy on an 1080p tv because it outputs 720p. I have only a very high level, layman's understanding of television formats and electronics. My assumption was that if you have a native hdmi signal, which is digital, any fully hdmi compliant TV should not perform any expensive upscaling on a digital signal it should be able to just display it, on the fly. I do understand an analog signal has to go through an expensive upscaling process and the best you can do is something like the framemeister, which is specialized for a 240p image.

So the question is: Should AVS lag on a 1080p tv, due to its 720 signal?

[tepples]

A 720p digital signal still needs to be upscaled for display on a 1080p panel. A good TV in "game mode" will do this with less than a frame of lag.

[Drew Sebastino]

Is it possible to just have the TV display it pixel per pixel with black borders around it? I've never looked that deep into menu on mine.

[hackfresh]

I'm not 100% sure but I think that post-processing features are a much bigger source of lag. I think upscaling from 720p to 1080p is pretty minimal...roughly 1/2 a frame on the good TV's.

Here are some measurements regarding the AVS lag.

http://nintendoage.com/forum/messagevie ... did=166023

[whicker]

The answer depends on the TV.

Does it have a game mode?
Does it have a "just scan" mode?
Is there an option to turn off motion smoothing?

If not, then it probably is consistently lagging 3-5 half-frames.
A $250 Wally World TV isn't going to have these options, unless it's an accident.

I'm not trying to be an elitist, but when I personally buy monitors and TV's, to get the features I need as a gamer I have to do research and get them custom delivered.


The way HDMI works is that any TV mode is going to stretch. However, there are some PC monitor modes that a video output chip could request that would cause a black border around the active image, but it's hit or miss as far as being supported by the TV.