Bungie Explains Halo 3's Resolution

For some folks artisitic merit or financial success of Halo 3 isn't what's really important: it's about how many pixels are on the screen. After there were some complaints about the 'truth' of the game's HD nature Bungie posted a missive on their site clarifying the output process for Halo 3's visuals. "Halo 3 uses not one, but two frame buffers - both of which render at 1152x640 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 ... gives our scenes ... 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."

Comments

Re:So...

[Bhodi]

What really matters is the quality of character and environment designs? Really? I guess you don't own a next generation system then; there's really no point to, ever, when there are so many good (and better) games out there for older systems. But I guess everyone who owns a PS3 or a X360 is just a graphics fanboy.

This issue is not overblown; we're talking about a flagship game on a next-generation HD platform, which isn't even HD. The game essentially runs at 640 and is upscaled because they couldn't figure out a way to get enough FPS to run it smooth at 720.

They have the gall to suggest that it's "practically impossible to discern a difference" (higher resolution makes zero difference?) and then insult people who notice. The "tinfoil hat wearers" are 100% correct in this case -- this is not an HD game. It may be loads of fun, and while it may run in HD, it's upscaled just like the fucking PS2 game on a PS3 without any of the smoothing extras.

Re:BFD

[TheQuantumShift]

Since I can't playback HD content with it, I'm going to have to say Celeron. Man those things suck. The entire collective of Intel must have been drunk throughout the nineties. I can't believe they still exist, worthless pieces of trash that they are.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.53GHz
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 2533.610
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc up pni monitor ds_cpl tm2 cid cx16 xtpr
bogomips : 5070.99
clflush size : 64

God damn it...