We have to cope with 480p and you're complaining about hi-res/polished/eye-candy 640p graphics? Damn you people.

Spent about 5 hours playing Halo 3 round a mates house this weekend, and its good and i enjoyed the game (didn't quite finish it though). however, i enjoyed it because i've been sucked into the storyline from owning the Xbox with the previous two games. I loved them and i wanted to know how it all panned out for the Chief...

BUT, i'm not impressed with Halo 3. its fun, yes, but it's slow, it lags in places, and when it's loading the next bit it stalls the game play, causing it to jerk. When you're in a Warthog, you can see the details in the ground appear as you move... this isn't impressive at all. i was sad to say that after reading all the rave reviews, it didn't feel as good as it should be. maybe my expectations were too high, but i own a PS3 and these are not issues i'd thought i'd come across in the 360.

I may even go as far as to say that Halo 3 is riding the waves of enthusiasm left by Halos 1 and 2, and not on its own merits.

I'm also disappointed to hear that its not fully HD... i had been told it was fully 1080... to hear its not, just 'upscaled', is disappointing.

In the war between 360 and PS3, graphics is a major player as much as anyone wants to play it down. For THE 360 game of 2007 to not hold that flag is surprising... it feels like to me that MS have been touting the 360 as the equal of the PS3, and then mislead customers by not living up to that expectation.

thoughts?

That is incorrect for most situations. Rendering is done to EDRAM and then resolved to system ram. When the resolve is done the MSAA samples are averaged together into a single sample per pixel. The whole screen won't fit into the EDRAM when using MSAA so the rendering is done in tiles, thus reusing the same memory over and over. This process consume no more memory than rendering without MSAA.

It does run at 640p. He just confirmed that.

You can think of a simplified version of the HDR technique and rendering a bright and a dark frame, then juxtaposing them and displaying the bright or dark parts of the bright or dark frame where appropriate, or doing a version of composite, or choosing any other technique that you feel would make sense.

Techniques like this are often used with digital photography as well -- you take the same picture a few stops apart and then combine the frames to render a single frame with a larger dynamic range. This allows you to get blue skies and naturally lit faces in the same frame where you'd normally have either a blown out sky or a poorly lit face.

The big issue here is that the 360 is billed as "we're better than the Wii because we're HD and people want HD" but their flagship game isn't HD.

Also, saying you've been "shortchanged 80 pixels" is minimizing the issue significantly.  The game is originally rendered with 79% as much detail as the lowest HD resolution.  You're not missing 80 pixels: you are literally missing (921600 - 747520 = 174080) 174080 pixels per frame.