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It seems that the Xbox 360 requirement that games be presented in at least 720p has been "retired" by Microsoft. The news has come about thanks to Black Rock's technical director David Jefferies in a guest article he wrote for online magazine Develop. The reasoning for this decision? It will allow developers to create games with better image quality that won't be sacrificed to meet higher resolution requirements.
HD TV manufacturers have been making their 720p LCD televisions with resolutions different than true 1280x720. "The lovingly crafted 1280x720 image has gone to be replaced," says Jefferies, "by something dependent on the quality of the LCD scaler." Because of this scaling, game visuals are upsampled by TV hardware, no matter how good the graphics actually are.
As a result, developers' work to create 720p graphics are a superfluous effort; by dropping the requirement, though, Jefferies claims that developers can add visual features like extra anti-aliasing to make the image actually look better, even if it's presented at a lower resolution than 720p.
According to Jefferies, "If we instead assume that the LCD is going to rescale then, for some games, it might be more sensible to present it with a better anti-aliased but lower resolution image in the first place." Jefferies also explained that the requirement was originally waived for Halo 3, which was presented at a resolution of 1152x640.
However, the problem with LCD TVs upsampling 720p games probably won't be such a hassle in the future: "As more and more LCDs ship with the full HD resolution of 1920x1080 then this will become less of an issue, but I’ve just had a look on Amazon and all the 26" and 32" Sony and Samsung TVs are still 1366x768."
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