lol , this is a bit embarasing for MS ... seroulsy , and man how people flamed Killzone 2 when developers stated that it will only work with 720 p :P

 Hows it embarassing.  The end result is gorgeous graphics.  They should be proud, the game is awesome.

Are you guys all meaning to say 480p (which is 640x480)? I don't think any console game is 640p. Correct me if wrong.

-- I read those forums a lil more -- sorry, wasn't familiar with 1138x640

I find it amazing in an unbelievably stupid manner how many people are going tits up because of this.

I love how you all notice the difference of a missing 142x80 pixels in Halo 3, OMGZITLUKZTURRRRDDD!!!!111111ZOMGWAFFLE!

...

Get a grip.

Only 640p eh?

The real question is... can it play on the Wii?

They should put that in the dictionary under ambidextrious!

The evidence is convincing, and as someone in the beyond forums pointed out, Halo 3 is running at a lower resolution that 1024x768, which people have been running with PC gaming for a decade now. Typically, I wouldn't consider this a big deal, but the Halo franchise is supposed to display the power of the Xbox product line.

Strength of graphics are one of Halo's primary selling points and Bungee stated that the graphics would look a lot better than the beta when it came out.

1280 x 720 = 921600

1138 x 640 = 728320

728320 / 921600 = 0.79 

So with the lower resolution you have 79% as much sharpness/data to look at on the screen.  It's not as trivial as you make it sound.  What's worse, however, is that if you have a native 720p display 720p games (95% of the 360's games) will be unscaled and look awesome whereas Halo 3 will be scaled and look significantly less awesome.

 Significantly less? Do you think screen resolution is the whole picture? What about textures, framerates, draw distance, number of objects on screen, shading and mapping, polygon count? Those things are not tied to the native resolution, and may actually increase due to having the resolution be lowered.*

 *Even though the framebuffer is seperate from the texture memory on the 360, some things in the texture memory can affect the framebuffer.

We don't have any hard numbers there, do we? Further, higher resolution does not imply 'lower draw distance' or 'fewer polygons'. We're talking about resolution here, not the whole of the game, and running a resolution lower than 720p natively *is* disappointing for the reasons I mentioned (especially since you now have to upscale for a native 720p set). 

The lower resolution suggests one of two things: (1) a last minute fix to increase performance or, and this is more likely in my mind, (2) bungee decided they needed additional framebuffer space for HDR or some other graphical trick(s).

So perhaps it would have been more relevant for you to bring up Halo 3's HDR rendering or other issues that were more likely the tradeoff.

Actually, it does.

Did anyone bother on checking the link that GranTurismo posted? Those screens are native 1920x1080.