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Rainbird on 20 April 2010
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The screen resolution is what it is, nothing that goes into creating a frame will change that.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-alanwake-sub-hd-blog-entry

...So, who is right - Remedy or the pixel counters? Perhaps the most crucial thing is that there is nothing in Maki's carefully worded statement that is at odds with what the pixel counters are saying. Native resolution of the actual framebuffer is never mentioned. That metric is indeed just one element in overall image quality, but it is also one of the most important. Remedy's argument is very similar to the one put forward by Bungie in the wake of Halo 3 being revealed as running at 640p. The bottom line there is that there's little doubt that the Master Chief epic is sub-HD, and would look significantly improved running at native 720p - indeed, the team's own shots confirm that.

Maki is quite right to point out that individual elements of the image operate at their own individual resolutions, but in most cases the opaque geometry usually operates at 720p. Killzone 2 has a 640x360-sized buffer for particles. Conversely, some of the textures on Kratos in God of War III are 2048x2048 in size, but both games are obviously 720p: no-one claims that these games are 360p or 2048p.

Moving on from that, when we select custom resolutions in PC titles, opaque geometry is the key metric being used to define the size of the framebuffer. It's the amount of pixels used to create the image: higher-resolution shadowmaps or textures can't change that, although they do of course play their own part in overall image quality. Regardless, it's also the case that going lower than 720p usually results in scaling artifacts (most noticeable on high detail and edges) and a blurrier image overall.

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Basically, the actual resolution is easy to comprehend, but that doesn't mean the components of a frame can't be of higher detail than what is expected of something rendered in 720p.