@Selnor: "Then theres the 2nd to utilize EDRam this year. Reach boasts 720p, 30 FPS and 4xMSAA on entire image. But more impressively is what that free chip allows the devs to add to the rest of the game, 60+AI + Vehicles + flying = most impressive fights in an FPS on consoles."

Where did you get that info from? Halo Reach runs at 1152x720 instead of 1152x640, which is the case for Halo 3. It's better but not 1280x720 which everyone will think when you say 720p.
Reach doesn't even have Anti-aliasing at all. They have improved post-processing so the jaggies are less noticeable, but still no "4xMSAA on entire image".

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-halo-reach-alpha-analysis-blog-entry

I totally agree.. Halo Reach is pretty much the first game,barring ninty nine knights, that has lots of enemy action on screen. Now wer talking CPU here and yes in that regard the cache on the CPU is horrible and has pretty bad branch prediction. Its still good to see them making progress on this, though...

I'm just saying that instead of going for PR pieces you should delve a bit more deeply in the technical side of things before starting a technical argumentation. The embedded eDRAM is a great addition, but it doesn't offer "everything for free" in many real use cases. Once again, Google for it and you'll find the exact references.

And you're wrong about KZ2. Google for it and you'll find that they're actually doing a supersampling Quincunx. Which also falls in the category of MSAA techniques. It's not like there's a switch between just two ways to perform AA. On PC games you'll often find a plug-in system for antaliasing resorting to very standard techniques because it has to run on a variety of hardware, where on consoles you code "close to the metal" and tend to employ less standard techniques, more tweaked to your precise goal. As such your repeated appeals to PC game settings make little sense: there's not such thing as "the" MSAA technique but a whole molteplicity of them and they won't always give better results than Quincunx or edge detection/blur, depending on things such as other post effects.

In your third paragraph you once again state something (the bolded) that is untrue in general, true in cases that don't put together resolutions of 720p / 10 bit hdr / 32bit z-buffer. It was a godsend for many multiplatform games and engines, allowing indeed a "free"  and quick MSAA on the 360.

Such is not the case when you want more complex setups. Which is why Halo 3 is sub-hd (they wanted their HDR over the resolution) or why quoting Remedy:

I'm pretty sure you'll be very happy with our shipping solution. We hate dithering and aliasing just as much as you I think. Hardware 4xAA on the Xbox360 is nice for a lot of things - it did take us a while to get the most out of it (E.g, refactoring the renderer quite a few times).

Shadow aliasing doesn't really have anything to do with the generic framebuffer resolution or aliasing quality, but having the game run with 4xAA in the framebuffer is kind of rubbing in any other visual quality problems there might be.

Please note that there's no mention of getting anything "for free" in this case. Actuallywe hear about them having to redesign their renderer around it. As always when someone wants to get the most out of a console there was a lot of work in overcoming the limitations of the hardware. That's the case with the PS3, using SPEs for pixel-processing when it makes sense. That's the case with the 360, designing your engine to use the limited 10MB of eDRAM to its best. A totally different scenario from the "free" AA that many quick and dirty engine jobs indeed got, but with much less interesting final overall results.

And btw, the second part of the Remedy guy's answer should be a hint of what others already told you: shadow aliasing has nothing to do with the framebuffer AA. It's about how shadows are calculated on the surfaces they hit, not about how they are translated to the pixel grid. And it's a whole different issue from what you employ full sceen AA for.

Finally, can you please links to factual evidence that:

1) Alan Wake will employ full-screen 4xMSAA ( the quotes I myself reported don't say that, as they may be talking about 4xAA on specific tiles)

2) it's the first ever console game to do so, ie all other games people mentioned such as Heavenly Sword are not doing 4xMSAA (I got the notion that HS does 1280x720 4xMSAA from the pixel-counters threads at Beyond3D)