Microsoft Drops 720p Demand for Xbox 360 Games

The consoles these days all support HD gaming. The Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 give you at least 720p images. Only the Wii doesn't support this yet, but it makes up with its unique way of gaming. Through the blog of the developer David Jefferies, it became clear that Microsoft no longer demands that games for the Xbox 360 have a minimum resolution of 720p. Gaming developers had to comply with this demand before if they wanted to release a game for the Xbox. Also the demand of full screen anti-aliasing has been dropped.

Microsoft has dropped the demand that Xbox 360 games have to be viewed in at least 720p when the console is running in HD mode. Developers can make their own choices now and decide if they want to use a different resolution to get better image quality. Games don't need to have full screen anti-aliasing anymore either. Microsoft has erased both of these demand this year off their technical certification requirements, a list with demands that every Xbox 360 game must comply with.

The dropping of these demands and therefore making it easier for developers to create Xbox 360 games, came out through the blog posting of David Jefferies, technical director of the English Black Rock Studio. On the website of the magazine Develop he also tells why Microsoft has actually dropped them. He says that most 720p televisions actually have a different screen resolution than 1280x720. For instance, the Sony Bravia LCD's that Black Rock uses, have a resolution of 1366x786 pixels. The television transform the incoming 720p signal automatically to a resolution of 1366x768. That doesn't mean that the advantage of the native 720p resolution of the Xbox 360 has disappeared and it means that the image quality actually depends on the build in up scaling technology inside the TV.

The easier guidelines give the developers more options, says Jefferies. He says that the GPU of the 360 is not powerful enough to supply a 720p image with a 4x msaa (MultiSample Anti-aliasing which is a type of anti aliasing which is used to improve image quality in games). With an image of a lower resolution, that is actually possible, and since the image will be transformed by the TV anyway, the quality of the input signal can be of the highest quality, says the developer. Microsoft has already ignored this demand themselves once. Halo 3 creates a progressive input signal with a resolution of 1152x640 pixels. Black Rock studio is working on a race game at the moment: Split/Second. It should be released in 2010. Jefferies didn't want to say which resolution was going to be used for this game.