Halo 3 Only 640p?
September 28th, 2007 by Erich Jurgens in FPS, Xbox360
Do 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!
Tags: FPS, Xbox360
September 28th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Oh, you missed out the final paragraph of from Bungie…
“n fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152×640 image and the scaled 1280×720, it’s practically impossible to discern the difference. We would ignore it entirely were it not for the internet’s propensity for drama where none exists. In fact the reason we haven’t mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings.”
No 720 is not scaled up… 1152, scaled to 1280 and then converted to 1080HD. Two complete seperate render buffers are used, one specificialy of HDR lighting alone… HALO 3 is actually rendering the equivalent of 1152×640 TWICE each frame… that’s a virtual resolution of 2304×1280 or enough power to run two seperate HD TVs…
Kudos to the 360, the power of its programmable graphics pipeline is now becoming evident.
Nice try Sony fanboy, next time to edit to suit please.
September 28th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Who are you calling a Sony Fanboy?
September 28th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Well regardless of all of that Bungie did a masterful job at crafting one of the best games ever. It looks fantastic anyway and it plays like a dream … with really great controls that have that hard to get “right feel”.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:46 am
It’s just a lame excuse for not having a proper 720p resolution. And even on 640p, it doesn’t look near as good as games like gears of war.
Halo 3 gameplay is nice, multiplayer is awesome, but stop saying the graphics are great, THEY’RE NOT!
September 29th, 2007 at 6:10 am
ohh stop complaining just beacuse the graphics are not the same kind of graphics as gears doesnt mean the graphics are not amazing it looks great and if they made it look like gears it would be going to far. maybe the video scenes but the game play would look weird.