Games like Halo 3 and MW2 don't have a final framebuffer of 720p.  They have a sub-HD frame buffer and let the 360 upscale.  Are there any other games that are doing as Remedy is doing and using their own software scaler instead of the 360's?

The difference is that this sounds like a deferred renderer from that description.

GTAIV used deferred lighting, I think, and Unreal Engine uses it for some effects. But I don't know if before AW there was such an extensive use on the 360. Whereas all big titles on PS3 work this way (Uncharted 1 &2, KZ2, GOW3). It looks more suited as a technique  to the PS3 than the 360, because it can lead to very big buffers than won't fit the eDram, and outside the eDram limits (10MB) the PS3 has more video memory thorughput than the 360, plus direct memory access for the SPEs I think.

It certainly adds a lot of flexibility when it comes to the rendering, but it will require the developer to make the composition of the buffers (that can be at different resolutions and thus require scaling) typically using the shaders hardware.

@elticker

The two things are not mutually exclusive. They can render geometry and textures to a smaller buffer like 576p, then resize it to 720p and compose it with many other buffers. Some might be at even a lower res than the g buffer (the mist, particle layers, distant sprites?), Others might  be rendered 720p natively (the HUD). In the end they are all resized to 720p and composed together, so the output is 720p (upscaled to 1080p by the hardware scaler if necessary by the TV settings).

What the pixel counters determine is the numbers for the geometry/textures resolution as they count along the edges of polygons.

This is an interesting couple of pictures.  It shows how much post processing helps out the pretty poop geometry framebuffer resolution.

do we have a confirmation yet?

To me it looks like Silent Hill.