nesdev.org

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?

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.

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.

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

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.