Halo 1 And 2 In Hi-Def On 360

Bungie has confirmed via one of its weekly updates that Halo 1 and 2 will be playable on the 360. Moreover, they'll look even better as gamers will have the option of watching in 720p as opposed to the original console's 480p. From the article: "But here's another bonus - the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions."

Comments

Wow, newer 3D chips are faster?

[the_maddman]

So, they're saying the newest 3D renderer can run the engine at a higher resolution? I never would have guessed on my own. Looks like the "Patch" to make Xbox games run on the Xbox 360 might just be replacing the engine, rather than trying to emulate x86.

Re:720p vs PC

[Ford Prefect]

But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.

Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.

Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.

Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again - go on, tell me which one's which. ;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!

And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.

Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...