Well, the rumors appear to be true. Bungie’s seminal action games for the Xbox, Halo:Combat Evolved and Halo 2, will not only run perfectly fine on the Xbox 360 but will run at 720p — a high resolution signal on HDTVs that provides a 1280 x 720 pixel picture compared with the 720 x 480 of standard 480i/p — and will have full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) enabled as well.
A while back, Microsoft announced that the 360 would have some level of backward compatibility. A handy feature for folks with big Xbox collections moving into the future. We worked closely with that team to ensure that Halo and Halo 2 both performed according to plan. That meant a lot of work for our test team.
To clarify, the “new” version of Halo or Halo 2 is simply the disk you have already. Pop it into your 360 and it’ll load up just like before. You will have to log into Xbox Live to enable Halo 2′s online functions, but both games will work immediately.
But here’s another bonus – the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn’t look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they’re running on a PC at those resolutions.
They provide some screenshots and comparison shots. That verbiage seems to tell me that they’re actually rendering to a true 1280 x 720 frame buffer and not simply “blowing up” a 720 x 480 frame buffer to be 1280 x 720. However, the screenshots are actually ambiguous. Here’s the first shot (click for larger version).
This comparison shot shows significantly more real detail in the 720p side than in the 480p side, arguing for a real 1280 x 720 frame buffer. But this second shot shows some strange areas of aliasing (see red surrounded areas).
Just odd. There’s a shot from Halo on their site as well that proves that no effort was made to have that title natively support widescreen. You’ll still be shooting fat, tubby grunts and elites. There’s been no word whether these titles will support the Xbox 360 concept of achievements, but I may still have to grab Halo and play through both again on Legendary.
One Response to “Halo and Halo 2 to support 720p and FSAA on Xbox 360”
I’m pissed about the lack of Halo widescreen support, because my old Xbox won’t sync up to the new TV I just bought.