Ps3 – way to disable the black bars on the bottom/top of the screen

ps3the-evil-within

I can't seem to find any way to remove the ugly black bars that are on the top and bottom of the screen. Supposedly, this is used to create a more cinematic look, but to me personally it looks ugly, and takes up too much room on an already small screen space.

Is there a way to disable them?

Best Answer

EDIT: June 2015

As of June 2015, the bars can now be disabled on all consoles via the settings. To disable:

  • Navigate to the Pause Menu
  • Selection Options
  • Select Graphics
  • Select Letterbox
  • Select Disable Letterbox

The following information is now out of date and should not be considered as the answer. It is left for archival purposes.

This is not possbile for PS3

Though they state that it gives a more cinematic view, there is another reason why they did it.

But Why?

By putting black bars on the top and bottom area, they can lower the amount of the game needing to be rendered at any time. Most PS3 renders the game at 720P. This means the amount of pixels from top to bottom is:

720P Pixels

Hence the name 720P. The number of pixels from left to right is:

1280 Pixels

The total number of pixels on the screen being rendered at any time by most games is equal to:

1280 x 720 = 921600

You can see the this in the image below, showing the resolution and the number of pixels on both the height and width for the most widely-adopeted resolutions:

So?

The problem is that the PS3 is incredibly old hardware, and such cannot render the game as good as they want to be with a low FPS. To combat this, they lowered the number of pixels being rendered by the PS3.

Without the black bars, the game could render like this: enter image description here With the black bars, the game DOES render like this: enter image description here

By doing this, you end up rendering less of the game, since sections are not being rendered and are being covered up by the black bars. This does Two things:

  • The game runs faster, with more FPS, compared with rendering all those pixels, and
  • Allowing the game devs to increase graphic abilities without loss of FPS as much

But why can you do it on PC?

#PCMasterRace ;)

Just kidding, the reason is that PC can be more powerful that PS3, so they can handle rendering all the pixels easily if they have good specs. The developers then don't need to limit the resolution they can render, so they allowed to change them in the Debug settings. Of cours, they would like you to refrain from doing that (to allow this practice to be widely adopted), but they still gave them the chance anyway

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