Framerate Issues; What if you aren't pushing screensize?

[Grey Acumen]

I've recently been considering the idea that a couple years down the road, I may eventually get a PS3(wow, reading back over, that sounded utterly ambiguous) I considered the 360 for a little bit, but the exclusives the PS3 is offering interest me more than the exclusives that the 360 offers (don't really care about sports games and I will NOT do an FPS with dual joysticks)

So the exclusives decided which of the HD consoles my preference goes towards, but it's still going to take a good lineup of both exclusive and multiplatform games to actually push me from considering to actually buying the thing. However, with a lot of multiplatform games, I've heard issues with the PS3 for loading times and framerate.

But that got me thinking; while there isn't much to be done about the loading time, what about the framerate? i don't own an HD TV, so I'm very likely to be playing at 480p maximum. The whole big outcry on HD games is that they often don't display at a full 720p and are just upscaled in order to save processing speed which in turn boosts framerate. So if you turned your display down to 480p, wouldn't that boost your framerate even further?

 

So basically, the question here is "Does PS3 still experienec framerate problems when being played at a 480 resolution?" Specifically, my main focus is on Orange Box and Assassin's Creed