famousringo said:
No kidding. Aren't the graphics in Halo toned down because the game supports 4-player split screen? Are there any other shooters this generation that boast that feature? |
360 (and often multiplat) games have to tone down the size of their screen buffers to about 640p, in order to double buffer the frame and depth buffers inside the 10MB embedded memory in the Xenos GPU.
Buffers larger than that have to do rendering by "tiling", which involves swapping out large chunks of memory from the EDRAM, and is thus kinda slow.
This is how Halo and CoD4, etc. achieve more than 30 fps on the 360. It wouldn't be doable at 720p on the 360, because you have to run at around 600-640p in order to really take advantage of one of the best features of the Xenos -- the EDRAM. Honestly, I don't know why people complain about sub-720p resolution, as long as its at least 600p -- it upscales just fine, and looks just fine.
Given a choice, I think most folks would choose twice the framerate over slightly higher resolution.
If the Xenos had like 14MB of EDRAM, it could do 720p without the slow memory swapping issue. It has 10MB though, so... unless your rendering is relatively easy to do, and you have "room" in the frame for it (for example, Forza, which probably doesn't do any hardware skinning, and thus can devote many more pipelines to fragment shaders, thus increasing overall pixel processing considerably), 600-640p is it.
