Clarifying thoughts on hi-def game rendering
Microsoft Director of Technical Strategy for Xbox Live Andre Vrignaud asked MS Senior Software Engineer Bruce Dawson for his thoughts on the trade-offs of 1080p game rendering vs. 720p. Here's his response:
2.25x: that's how many more pixels there are in 1920x1080 compared to 1280x720
55.5%: that's how much less time you have to spend on each pixel when rendering 1920x1080 compared to 1280x720-the point being that at higher resolutions you have more pixels, but they necessarily can't look as good
1.0x: that's how much harder it is for a game engine to render a game in 1080p as compared to 1080i-the number of pixels is identical so the cost is identical
There is no such thing as a 1080p frame buffer. The frame buffer is 1080 pixels tall (and presumably 1920 wide) regardless of whether it is ultimately sent to the TV as an interlaced or as a progressive signal.1280x720 with 4x AA will generally look better than 1920x1080 with no anti-aliasing (there are more total samples).
Follow the link for more analysis from Andre and an interesting comment thread. Is all this 1080p babble making your head hurt yet?
