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In the latest of his regular tech columns for Develop, Black Rock Studio’s David Jefferies has suggested that Microsoft has dropped the requirement put in place that demands developers’ games made for the 360 feature 1280×720.
In his article Jefferies addresses the relative merits of screen resolution and anti-aliasing – two disciplines that are hard to achieve simultaneously without unrealistic GPU demands.
"We are making a trade-off and saying that the screen resolution is more important to us than the quality of the anti-aliasing," said Jefferies, when discussing the fact that while both HD consoles can output both 4xMSAA and 2xMSAA, the demands of 1280×720 make the former option very difficult.
"This isn’t necessarily an entirely voluntary move because, until recently, Microsoft had a TCR insisting that games run at 1280×720 – providing you weren’t one of the lucky ones like Halo, who got it waived and ran at 1152×640, that is," he added.
In the same feature, Jefferies discusses the fact that while 1920×768 screens are increasingly common in the home, most still deliver a 1366×768 image.
"It’s is for this reason that Microsoft recently retired the TCR insisting on 1280×720. Now we are free to make the trade-off between resolution and image quality as we see fit," revealed Jefferies.
