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."

BFD

[Eponymous Crowbar]

Is it a fun game, or not? Debate that question if you must, but skip the minor technical details. It reminds me of the original Xbox's CPU -- some people swore it was a Celeron, some said a P3. I say what ends up being played on the screen is all that really matters.

Fun should come before visuals, but...

[TriezGamer]

I haven't had a chance to play Halo 3 yet, so I can't say anything about the game as a whole, but I'm glad to see they're more concerned with a steady frame-rate than killer visuals. I'd rather play a game at 320x240 with acceptable FPS (which I did back in the days of the original Unreal when I didn't have an accelerator) than play at 1024x768 at 20. Anything under 30 FPS irritates me to no end.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Internally it has two whatever by 640 framebuffers. The images in these framebuffers are in some manner composited and then scaled to the output resolution. As a result of this, some scaling artifacts are visible when playing in 720p or 1080p.

This is a big deal if you live and die by resolution as many internet fanboys do. However, I'm of the opinion that a game's resolution has little impact on what really matters for a game's visuals: the quality of the character and environment designs. The impact of resolution on games is ridiculously overblown.

Wait for the PC version...

[rtechie]

Those who care about this can wait for the PC version which I'm sure will allow you to pump the resolution to 1600x1200 (or possibly more by editing the .ini files) and zip along in glorious DirectX 10 goodness with their $500 video cards. Of course, by the time it comes out for the PC it will look dated (like Halo 2) and the people with the high-end rigs will be playing something else.

But if you really want it, it's coming.

Pixel Peeping Video Game Style

[ScotchForBreakfast]

All the complaints about Halo 3's resolution reminds me of all the "pixel peeping" that goes on when it comes to digital cameras. Everyone gets hung up on tech specs to the point that they stop looking at the image in question.

Halo 3 looks nice, and plays great. That's all that matters to me. I'm certainly willing to forgo some extra pixels in favor of a smoother experience.

Resolution

[Wilson_6500]

I think it happened right around the time that HDTV became available, but at some point resolution--previously a technical term--somehow became a buzzword related to quality. It's gotten to the point where I can't stand hearing people talk about 640p or 1080i or whatever, because it just comes off as marketing spew and e-penis-waving.

All these Microsoft apologists...

[Ang31us]

Gears of War and BioShock are both displayed at a native 1920 x 1080 in progressive scan on my cousin's 360 Elite. The lighting in both games is amazing, as are the visuals, and the gameplay.

The real problem is Halo's graphics engine, which has been too demanding of the graphics card/processor since Halo 1. They're not going to admit that their graphics engine is slow or that the 360's graphics card can't crunch through double-bufferred 1080p using an engine that is maintained at Microsoft.

It goes to show that third-party developers have a better handle on getting the most out of the 360's PC hardware than Microsoft.

but NextGen was supposed to be the HD era!

[captain_cthulhu]

We all know it's nit-picky to count pixels, but I am glad that someone called them on this. this 'NextGen' of consoles was supposed to be the HD-era of console gaming and here we are getting our corners cut secretly!

I remember Peter Moore saying that this generation will also eliminate the jaggies. the anti-aliasing is better in these new consoles but not enough to eliminate aliasing. The marketers can spout lies upon lies before release because no one ever calls them on it later, so I say GOOD JOB and KEEP IT UP!

so they cut corners to get a good frame rate. good grief! if this Gen of consoles were really the HD-era, then every game should be able to do 60fps at 1080p, period. I don't blame Bungie for this though, it's squarely MS's bucket of lies. Also, I am no Sony fanboy - for the PS3's price, it should have no jaggies and every game running 60fps at 1080p as well as my laundry. Guess we'll have to wait until next generation for the NextGen... until then, we're all suckers - albeit having fun with exceptional gameplay :)

Re:All these Microsoft apologists...

[Gulthek]

It's not just "lighting" that Bungie is talking about. But high dynamic range rendering [wikipedia.org]. Notice how in Halo 3 when you are coming out of a dark tunnel the sunlit areas are blindingly bright? That's just a bit of the HDRR magic at work. Bioshock and Gears of War, both great, beautiful games, don't have this. It's a tradeoff to be sure, but as a amateur photographer I have to give Bungie the edge here. I don't notice the loss of pixels (I didn't even know about it until this article) but I sure as hell notice the lighting's range.

Re:but NextGen was supposed to be the HD era!

[NeutronCowboy]

I'm guessing that you started gaming with the XBox and PS2? Otherwise you'd have experienced first-hand that the statement "it's next gen, so it should x at 60 FPS!" is as old as gaming in general. It used to be that things should be 60 FPS at 256 simultaneous colors or GTFO (no getoffmylawn jokes, please). I guess it's now 60 FPS at 1080p. This complaint is based on the complete lack of understanding how graphics technology and how game development works.

1. Just because hardware can output things at resolution x, color-depth y and z objects on screen doesn't mean that it'll draw things at a particular frequency. Maxing out a particular aspect of an architecture generally means that there's a cost that has to be paid elsewhere. There is no free 60FPS.

2. Developers will always focus on shiny pictures. Most PR material is still sent out as still-pictures, and most people judge beauty by still frames. As a result, developers tend to optimize for prettyness rather than smoothness.

Yeah, I know. The original poster is little more than an HD troll, and should be ignored. This complaint is still my major pet peeve anytime a new generation rolls around - invariably, tons of people will complain 6 months after launch that it doesn't do x, y, or z at 60 FPS. Then they blame it on developers, manufacturers or PR people, when the problem is simply that they don't understand the topic they're talking about.

Yeah, there is a problem with marketing promising the moon and delivering a shiny pebble. But if you don't know this by the time you see your second commercial.... that's your problem, and not the problem of the developers.

Rant off.

720p Guarantee

[Enderandrew]

Didn't Microsoft DEMAND that all games must meet 720p to qualify as a 360 title?

Didn't they guarantee that they were ushering in the HD era?

I guess that didn't apply to their own internal titles.

Bioshock looks better all around, has far more detail, oh, and runs natively at 720p without any problems. Why can't Halo 3? I don't get it.

Fuck Upscaling

[Ren.Tamek]

This is actually a rampant problem on the xbox 360. I used to own one, and one of the first things I noticed about the machine was that images which should be crisp on your display were actually blurry around the edges. This odd phenomenon occurs everywhere, from the 360 dashboard, to the game menus and fmv's, to the in game graphics themselves. It seemed likely to me that this was because the machine is rendering things at a low resolution, and they trying to upscale by 20-30% in both x and y directions, which causes distortions in the image because it isn't a sensible division, like 100%. Every single game i've played has this problem, except settlers of catarn. If you are reading this and you have a 360, go download the demo of this off live arcade and try it out. Notice how crisp and clean the visuals are? The game is rendered from the get go in your native resolution, nwhich results in a sharp image with no distortion. You also never see any stretching, because if you're using an unorthodox screen shape (I used my monitior, which is 5-4) it will use your exact resolution as the buffer size. This post it entitled 'fuck upscaling,' because the fuzzy blur you get from every game the machine plays gives me a headache after about 2 hours play. If they want to reduce the resolution then fine, but just output whatever you render, don't upscale. I had to sell my 360, and one of the reasons was because of badly defined visuals. It should be the first thing people consider after high frame rate, in my opinion.