Interesting. There are a number of reasons why the graphics *may* appear slightly b better, LOD rendering being one of them, as someone already mentioned. Hadn't heard of this new resolution, but the hardware scaler should already be boosting the resolution to 1080i/p which is 1920x1080. I'm curious to find out why this guy believes the graphics are that much better, or if he thinks this is April 1st.

It probably also helps the sluggish menus.

well I think ill be upgrading my hard drive to 120GB so I can install all my games in there....

I installed a drive on my old PS2. Zero load times and quicker menus. Sounds good if you can for the 360... but improve graphics? I don't really think so.

i assume the benefits on installing the game make for an overall crisper experience. perhaps having the game load quicker and more silently tricked his mind into believing the game actually looked better.

If there were noticeable graphical benefits to installing the game on the HDD, MS would say so. They wouldn't sit back and hope that the feature spreads by word of mouth, they'd say up front "here's one more awesome reason to buy a 360/upgrade the HDD!"

Can I just point out that this is not totally impossible. I mean, I doubt it myself, but perhaps there is a system where developers can chose exactly what gets installed onto the harddrive... I don't exactly know how this system has been put into place.

Anywho, harddrives provide faster access to content than what a DVD/CD/BD can, anyone who knows about computers knows this. It's why the PS3 has so many mandatory installs, and the 360 is bringing in this feature of optional installs.

Now, lets just say that Fable II had two texture sets, one for when people want to run the game off of the optical media, and one set for people running of the HDD. Running off the HDD is, as previously mentioned, faster, therefore the textures can be of greater size when it comes to streaming them, and moving them to the RAM. Bigger textures = higher quality = nicer graphics.

Now I am not saying that this is what is happening, I do not know whether the NXE allows for this, or whether Microsoft has released libraries for the devs to use which enables this. However, if the NXE did support this, Fable II is very much likely to be one of the first games to support it, as it's a relatively high hyped first party game which was only recently released.

Sure, you can point that out. It's not impossible. The thing is, if it were actually happening MS would be yelling it from rooftops. Everyone would have heard by now, and they would have heard from an executive of some sort or another, not some random blogger. MS would not keep quiet about this functionality if it were something genuinely noticeable.

@ChichiriMuyo:

Like I say, I doubt it, but there a couple of posters on this thread who are illinformed and think that reduced load times/pop in can be the only advantage to this.

They may not shout out about it if too few games supported it at launch, they wouldn't want to get everyone hyped up about it, just to find that very few games supported it for the first month, or so *coughtrophiescough*.

The whole point of load times is to take the information off the disc and into the system, that's why having an install reduces load times, because it can put the info into the system faster than disc. The system bandwidth between the CPU, RAM, and GPU doesn't magically increase. Like you said, the hard drive provides access to the information faster, but it doesn't mean the system will be able to process that information any faster.

The problem with having two texture sets is as follows: It'd be of no use to have a second texture set because if it was higher quality it would just reck the performance of the game. And more importantly, the DVD used for 360 games couldn't accomodate two sets, they'd have to remove other content in the game.