Speed Issue between Japanese and UK versions

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Ever since I started playing Gran Turismo, i've been playing on PAL version, only recently a guy i met told me that the Japanese version of GT3 is faster!!?? now i havent played the Japanese version myself but is this true? and if this is true will GT4 have a 60Hz option?

I am sorry if this has already been mentioned in previous threads, if it has then close this thread. Thanx
 
Not "faster" as such - just the screen refresh rate.

NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) - which is standard in Japan/USA - is made of 525 horizontal lines, refreshing 60 times a second (60Hz).

PAL (Phased Alternating Line) is standard pretty much everywhere else, except France, and is made from 625 horizontal lines - better resolution - but refreshes 50 times a second (50Hz).
 
but is it a noticeable difference?

I bought Tekken Tag Tournament on PAL once which is very very slow compared to Japanese/USA version (massive difference).

I need to know if GT4 will have 60Hz option otherwise ill get US version.
 
To be honest, no idea.

PAL pictures are better quality, but for movement NTSC should look smoother. That said, my TV runs at 100Hz so I don't actually care.

Most games these days come with a 50/60Hz option, so I wouldn't worry.
 
Originally posted by Famine
To be honest, no idea.

PAL pictures are better quality, but for movement NTSC should look smoother. That said, my TV runs at 100Hz so I don't actually care.

Most games these days come with a 50/60Hz option, so I wouldn't worry.
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I haven't noticed a difference in speed on my PAL GTC and my NTSC GTC. So I assume it's not so noticeable in GT3 as well, mainly because PS2 games have quite high framerates. You could really notice a difference in GT2 though, I refused to buy the PAL version when it came out because it was so slow in comparison to the NTSC version. Although if you've never played the NTSC version you probably wouldn't notice.
 
I have the NTSC version and it looks really nice in 16:9 if you have a widescreen TV. But it's really hard to read the smaller text.:)
 
Originally posted by ZZII
The human eye sees at under 30fps so I wouldn't worry about it.
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That's not really true.

Interestingly enough, I have discussed this subject at length with Dr. Norberto Grzywacz, senior scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute.

There's a lot of mis-information about how fast the human eye sees. You only need about 20 FPS to trick someone into thinking they're seeing smooth motion, but that requires motion blurring. Movies run at 24 FPS, and you can definitely see choppiness during long pans in outdoor scenes that use faster film, because there is no blurring. Video games do not blur one frame into the next, so you need more like 60 FPS before things are completely smooth.

The rods in your eyes react very quickly, and can easily perceive flicker at very fast rates. That's why modern video cards don't support refresh rates below 60 Hz, because it will give you a splitting headache. The recommended refresh rate for all modern monitors is 75 - 85 Hz. Higher than 85 degrades image quality a little, but lower than 75 will give most people eye strain after an hour.

PAL TV's are 50 Hz because European electricity is 50 Hz. If you're not used to being in Europe, most people will notice immediately that the street lights flicker because they're running at 50 Hz. Some people can detect flicker up to 100 Hz.

So, it all depends how you look at it. With proper motion blurring, 24 FPS is fairly acceptable, but games don't have this, which is why it's desirable for any game to maintain a framerate over 60 FPS.

TV's are more forgiving than your average monitor, though. The persistance of phosphors blurs things together a bit making them look more smooth.
 
hertz (Hz) is the SI measurement of frequency....

you can measure just about anything that repeats itself in Hertz,
recently people have just begun to hear the term and associate it with the speed of a cpu clock, but that is just one application out of thousands where the term is applied, such as line (mains) voltage radio frequencies and sonar (measured in milihertz (10^-3 Hz)

in this case it has nothing to do with the speed of a game, the refresh rate is how many times in one second the Television Tube refreshes the image on the screen, i.e. how fast it 'flickers'

it will not effect how fast the game runs, only the console controls that , it has nothing to do with the TV. You can go out and buy high-tech 120Hz Nicam Digital supersize TVs now but it will play a game at the same speed as your 20 year old black and white 50Hzer in the attic.
the option at the start of the game for you to choose 50 or 60 Hertz is to do with TV compatibility, (not the speed of gameplay) if your in the US please use 60 Hz and the UK use 50Hz, its that simple...

however, i have noticed that the Japanese version of Tekken 3, Tag and 4 play faster than the pal version....i dont know why but it has nothing to do with your TV thats for sure...
 
TurboSmoke:

You seem to be misinformed about how refresh rates work, especially in consoles. It is a fact that many games run faster in NTSC than they do in PAL.

In a perfect world, the CPU would calculate the gemoetry of a scene, send it to the video subsystem, the scene would be rendered in VRAM, then sent whenever it was time for the screen to update. This is basically how it works in most PC games. If you're playing Quake 3 and your system happens to be running at 53 FPS in a busy scene, but your monitor is refreshing at 85 Hz, that simply means that your video card isn't running as fast as your monitor and some frames will be shown twice while the video card is catching up. You'd never notice.

This is not the way it works in consoles. In older consoles, the video retrace is the clock that the entire system is built around, and this is still true to some degree in new consoles. Games are hard-coded to run at 60 FPS. When a game gets converted to PAL, they can't just turn down the refresh rate and expect everything to work OK. Things have to be re-coded. There are 100 more lines on the screen. This can mean more work for the video subsystem and therefore more chance of slowdown in gameplay. Sometimes there are just black bars put on the top and bottom of the screen. To get from 60 FPS to 50 FPS, the game gets slowed down by 20%. Sometimes developers take the easy way out and just leave it like that -- PAL players are stuck with a game that is simply 20% slower than the NTSC version (like Tekken). Generally, this will be compensated for, as it is in GT3. The game gets slowed down 20%, but then to make up for that the code is updated so things happen faster. The games are far from identical, though.
 
Originally posted by TurboSmoke
cool, you learn something new every day...cheerz :)

however, shouldnt this thread be in the Electronics forum?
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Or the amateur rocket-science forum:lol:
 

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