Just got a shiny new Xbox One? Well be prepared to be a little disappointed if you were planning on hooking up your Sky or Virgin Media box – as the output may come with quite a bit of judder. We noticed this on our Xbox One, but put it down to the simple fact that the Sky box won’t be supported until 2014 – now we’re hearing that it’s actually down to the refresh rate of the Xbox One.
In the US the most common refresh rate is at 60Hz, so it’s only natural that the Xbox One outputs at 60Hz – which means the Xbox One is pushing 60 frames per second to your TV. Whilst that’s great for gaming, in the UK TV is broadcast at 50 frames per second, at a refresh rate of 50Hz. What that means is when you hook up your cable box in the UK to the HDMI input, the Xbox One is trying to push through 60 frames per second when it’s only received 50. What results of that formula is that every sixth frame will be a duplicate of a previous frame – meaning there will be judder.
Obviously this is a major issue for Microsoft, with the company hoping to takeover the world with its TV aspirations, and it’s likely that it’ll have to go back to the drawing board and lock the user interface at 50Hz when using the TV mode – after all upscaling will likely cause a degradation in picture quality.
Source: Eurogamer
