Halo 3 has quickly come under fire for disc-read errors and scratched discs, but now some tech heads on the Beyond 3D forums have found what they believe to be evidence that the quintessential game of Microsoft's 'all games in HD' console runs natively at a paltry 640p -- not 720p, not HD* -- and then upscales.
How did they come to this conclusion, you ask? By counting pixels. (Is this what we've come to as gaming enthusiasts -- measuring a game's visual fidelity with spyglass in hand?) ... Remember when we just played games?
Still, if true, Halo 3 would not be the first Xbox 360 game to compromise resolution for performance. Perfect Dark Zero also runs at 640p, and it's well known that Bizarre Creations dropped Project Gotham Racing 3 even lower, to just 600p, in order to achieve an acceptable frame rate. But this is Halo 3, and if you press your ear to the screen you can already hear the snarling internet mobs gathering up their pitchforks and nooses.
Whatever it is...it's almost like the game is not rendering correctly when I hook my 360 up to my monitor. It works fine on my TV...strange...
the breakfast of champions
680p is closer to 720p than it is to 480p, so it's high-er def... but none of them are close to 1080p, so none of them are real high def :P
but seriously, the 360 has a pretty good scaler, so this isn't as big of a deal as is being made of it. yeah, it sucks that it isn't being rendered in as high of a resolution as possible, but people with 1080p tvs are getting screwed on all their games then... and people like me using a VGA cable on PC monitor, hell, we don't even get proper aspect ratios yet....
my prediction: next xbox is called Xbox1080 - all games are required to be rendered in 1920x1080, requiring 60fps would be nice too... but we'll have to see where technology takes us by then.