halo3-80p.jpgDo you ever play games that look amazing and wonder how they can possibly be running so smoothly in HD? Well apparently, in Halo 3’s case, it’s not. Instead of being presented in “true” HD, Halo 3 is simply up scaled to 720p from 640p. Is the missing 80p a problem? Not at all. Bungie officially explained that this is the trade off required to achieve a game that feels real.

Naturally it’s more complicated than that. In fact, you could argue we gave you 1280 pixels of vertical resolution, since Halo 3 uses not one, but two frame buffers – both of which render at 1152×640 pixels. The reason we chose this slightly unorthodox resolution and this very complex use of two buffers is simple enough to see – lighting. We wanted to preserve as much dynamic range as possible – so we use one for the high dynamic range and one for the low dynamic range values. Both are combined to create the finished on screen image.

This ability to display a full range of HDR, combined with our advanced lighting, material and postprocessing engine, gives our scenes, large and small, a compelling, convincing and ultimately “real” feeling, and at a steady and smooth frame rate, which in the end was far more important to us than the ability to display a few extra pixels. Making this decision simpler still is the fact that the 360 scales the
“almost-720p” image effortlessly all the way up to 1080p if you so desire.

This doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Of course, I’ve been playing Halo 3 on a standard definition TV set. If you have an HD TV and you do notice that the game isn’t playing in true HD, feel free to leave a comment!

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Tags: FPS, Xbox 360