I've never heared of that site beyond3D can sum1 tell me what the site is known for mainly....

From the Remedy forum:
"We're just pushing 16:9 720p out and the Xbox360 OS handles the rest."
Tons of games "output" 720p, but what's matter is the rendering resolution. All this fuss is caused by all the vague statements made by Remedy guys.

forum.alanwake.com/showpost.php?p=69940&postcount=885

There is a difference between running at 720p and having native resolution of 720p.

It's the whole point of this thread, since the pixel counters measure the geometry rendering resolution, whereas Remedy's answer speaks of the final resolution the game "runs" at - after all the buffers have been resized and combined. It's an important distinction if you quote Remedy's post as an answer to the pixel counting measuring.

My point is, that Remedy got plenty of opportunities to simply say "Alan Wake native resolution is 720p". But instead we got  a lot of this marketing bull*t like "Game pushes out 720p", "Game runs at 720p", "In the end all are combined to form one 720p image" and so on. They do sound like they are making excuses.

so both mazinger and quaz say its 540p

well il go with the devs on this one

So why is Remedy using their own scaling instead of letting the 360 do it?

they combine all teh layers to run at 720p so its native 720 not 540p and upscaled to 720p

Because the HUD and probably some effects work at 720p. This is the process: rendering at 960x540 -> scaling to 720p -> pasting the HUD (-> postprocessing (?)).

The HUD is rendered at 720p (like in ffxiii or sc) because upscaled text is blurry and less readable.