Nicely put, I guess 1080p is Ultra HD.

If you read my posts in this this thread, it's pretty clear that I don't care about HD. All I'm saying is that if we're going to have some standards, they should be pretty clear otherwise they're useless. 640p may be "nice", "enough", "great" or whatever subjective thing we want to call it, but based on what I know I don't think it's considered HD. I think we both agree that this is not a very important thing... Certainly not for me, since I only have a 32 inch TV.

@JaggedSac: I corrected my sentence.

 And you don't understand what that process means as far as image quality is concerned: adding redundant pixels in such a manner dilutes the information contained in the frame creating a blurred out/fuzzy looking aspect, you might have heard about the "vaseline effect" present on the ps3's GTA4, that's the result of upscaling images.

Since NG2 renders in a non standard resolution that needs to be upscaled using algorithms, it deteriorates the overall image quality.

Again, if you know a way to force the 360 to output the image without upscaling/downscaling it I'm interested on it. 

They don't offer the option not to do it because it would be fucking pointless. Whatever you hate about the picture being upscaled...it would be much worse without it. I can guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that interpolation only increases the picture quality on large screens. You don't hear people turning off upconversion when they play dvds do you? It is the exact same thing. I can tell you that a dvd played without upconversion is much worse than a dvd played with upconversion. Upconversion and interpolation are the same thing. Graphics engines use interpolation for ALOT of processes. Lighting algorithms use interpolation to determine the amount of light effect each pixel on a polygon based on the normal vector of each vertice of a polygon.

Whatever the uses of interpolation are for the internal proceses of game engines, interpolating the whole frame to bump up the resolution will inflict the image quality and presentation of a game. Scaling operations reduce the quality of the visuals and I have nothing but wonder that you are defending a practice that means muddened, less precise images.

I like my games to be crispy not blurred out pixel soup. But hey, these days and age blur filters pass off as AA, people are swallowing everything. 

OH MY GOD. Are you saying that the picture is being stretched horizontally? Is that what you think the interpolation is doing? You set the console to display it's picture in widescreen and then the games shoot that widescreen data out to the tv. It is not stretching it in terms of widescreen There are games that spit out "black bars" on the side even with interpolation, most of the old school XBox Live Arcade games do this. The black bars have nothing whatsoever to do with iterpolation.

Let me try an example to help you to maybe understand this. Say I take a picture on a camera of about 5 megapixels. This image would look fine on a crt or small lcd. But when the image is blown up to the size of say a 50"lcd, then the picture is shitty looking. It is the exact same image, same data, but "zoomed in" and the amount of data cannot cover the area of the screen properly without looking blocky and pixelated. People realized this was a problem and that it needed fixing. So now most tv manufacturers put this in the hardware of the television.

 And, interpolation is one of many ways one can implement anti-aliasing, dude.

I understand perfectly what the interpolation algorithms do. 

What you don't understand is that taking the output from the game engine and applying post-processing to bump up the pixel count will deteriorate image quality. Image resizing algorythms guesses are aproximate - that's why upscaled DVD's don't look near as good as proper 1080p footage.

If NG2 game engine can only produce 585 lines, filling up the gap with interpolated lines will not look as good as if the game was rendered in 720. Otherwise you are claiming that the upscaling can produce a more accurate guess for pixels than the game own engine and I'd have a hard time believing that. 

Well of course DVDs don't look nearly as good as Blu-Ray's, but if you have a shit load of dvds, you still want to be able to watch them on your big screen without a bunch of shitty pixelated mess. If it did look as good as Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray would not be necessary. WTF? But I will say that interpolated dvd signals are a hell of alot better than not interpolated dvd signals.

Yes, having a 585p image is not as good as a 720p one. That is common sense and has nothing to do with interpolation. If the developers wanted to spend processing power on something else instead of higher res, it is probably a worthwhile sacrifice. Interpolation does cause a loss of image quality, but only if the output image is the same size or smaller than the input image, which would then of course be pointless in this case.

 So we're back to square one, upscaling and it's associated mathmagics are a croc of shit and NG2 visuals suffer because of them.

Now that you wasted a whole thread on your interpolation pet peeve, it's time to raise my voice to how 585p is a misleading and wrong term. 

 Nope, your initial statement was that interpolation was "a croc of shit" I do believe.  I just proved your statement was a fallacy.  Interpolation helps to increase what would otherwise look crappy, look good on a large screen.  If you don't have a large screen, it does not affect you in any manner.