hey guys I just got a quick question with a resolution problem. Ok I bought a new 360 2 weeks ago and then baught a new Samsung 40" series 5 LCD tv on wednesday which displays 1080P. I baught a ps3 at the same time and it displays 1080P with no problem through the HDMI cable I bought.  Any way, My 360 wont display at 1080, either through the HDMI cable or component cables :( This is the strange thing, The 360 is set to 1080p and the TV says its recieving a 1080p signal but the image is displaying an upscaled 720p image :'( So I get some nasty jaggy edges etc. And I know the difference betwene 720p and 1080p so I'm not going crazy. I used to have the 360 on a 720p TV and that was all fine. Is my 360 broken or is this a known problem?

Thanks for any of your answers :)

youre loaded

If the TV says its recieving a 1080p signal, why are you saying the screen is displaying an upscaled 720p image?

I mean, how do you know?

Not all games run in 1080p (in fact, i doubt many really do) and will be upscaled from 720p.

How can you check on your 360 to see what resolution it's putting out? I can hardly tell the difference between 480p and 1080p (yes I know that's a huge jump) so I don't really notice or care, but it would be an interesting tidbit of info to know.

Very simple.
Go to the "My Xbox/System Settings/Display" menu.

There isn't anything I'm aware of that explicitly tells you this, but for anyone with good vision, the difference between 720p->1080p is as obvious as 480p->720p.

That said, a decent upscaler can make it difficult to tell, but the image will definitely look softer than a native 1080p image. While I'm not sure how the 360 handles upscaling, for some games it is clear as day they are internally rendered at 720p or lower.

Edit: I'm assuming you're asking what its "outputing" before upscaling. Otherwise read the post above me

ok if you have an image that is displaying at 720 and being upscaled to a higher resolution what the screen has to do is kind of blend the pixels together and then kind of redraw the image at the higher resolution, what happens then is any lines that might be on an angle will end up jagged as it tries to blend a line created to run perfectly along 1 pixel increments into 1.5 or 2 pixel increments. You get parts in a line that instead of jumping by 1 pixel they jump by 2 pixels or the line is forced to be blended between 4 pixels in a best fit kind of manner and that’s even worse. I don’t really know any other way of explaining how to tell the difference, but it’s very visible if you have the eyes for it. (its terrible during racing games because the lines in the car doors etc show up all jaggy instead of fine 1 pixel lines.

yeah i know how to change the resolution on the 360, its set to out put a 1080 signal and the tv says its receiving a 1080 signal, but even the 360s main menu screen is displaying an upscaled 720p image :( the ps3 is crisp with pixel perfect pictures. The 360 games I own all say on the back that they support 1080p, does the 360 just upscale alot of its games?

The difference between 480p and 720p is AMAZING! so much so I dread playing my wii now, But its only a difference that you can see on a HD tv, on a standard def tv you cant tell any difference. 480 to 1080 makes 480 look like an abomination!

Pretty much. The 360 hardware isn't powerful enough to do most games at 1080p. Add on to this that the frame buffer isn't large enough to render 1920x1080 with double buffering, so rendering at 1080p would cause flickering.

That said, Halo 3 renders 2 frames at 1152x640, the merges them to perform HDR, which shows the system has a decent amount of power. But even then that is still only 3/4 of the pixels in 1080p. Halo 3 says 1080p on the box, so this is definitely proof that games which say they do 1080p can be upscaled.