Microsoft Drops Xbox 360 HD Resolution Requirement

Microsoft has historically required that all Xbox 360 games run at a resolution of 1280x720 (720p) other than certain exceptions made for titles like Halo 3. David Jefferies of Black Rock Studios went into great detail about working with various resolutions in an article on Develop, mentioning that Microsoft recently dropped the requirement that all games run at 720p.

"By asserting that screen resolution is more important than anti-aliasing we’re leaving ourselves vulnerable when the customer’s LCD decides it’s going to rescale the image to a new resolution anyway," said Jefferies. "If we instead assume that the LCD is going to rescale then, for some games, it might be more sensible to present it with a better anti-aliased but lower resolution image in the first place."

"As more and more LCDs ship with the full HD resolution of 1920x1080 then this will become less of an issue, but I’ve just had a look on Amazon and all the 26" and 32" Sony and Samsung TVs are still 1366x768," he continued. "It’s is for this reason that Microsoft recently retired the TCR insisting on 1280x720. Now we are free to make the trade-off between resolution and image quality as we see fit."

Considering the prevailing number of SD televisions still in use, it's curious to us that this requirement was ever put in place.