Let's spell this out clearly: 1080p support is on the way, in what's being called the "Fall Update" for the 360. That's the big announcement. For a huge percentage of the users of HDTV on 360s today, in no way does the announcement explain whether or not any of us can actually expect an improvement in picture quality. I'd like to take some time to clarify the facts, and then explain what this means to everyone.
The Problem To Be Solved
LCDs have an internal resolution - a single, hardware-level, physical resolution - and to play at anything other than that physical resolution will require that the hardware scale the output to meet the physical resolution - whether that's up or down.
Those funny HDTV labels mean something - 720p, for example, is a physical resolution of 1280x720. 1080p is 1920x1080. Those "i" things instead of "p" things are interlace resolutions; cut the vertical resolution in half, deliver the first half in the first frame, and the second (missing) half in the second frame, offset down a bit, all of which is pointless for an LCD user because we don't have a beam to interlace with; using an i resolution will always upconvert to a p resolution, and sometimes with a loss of quality on the way. Just Say No.
The 360 VGA, pre-November 2006 update (or whenever it actually ships) is 640x480 (4:3, 1.33, aka VGA), 848x480 (16:9, 1.77, aka Widescreen 480), 1024x768 (4:3, 1.33, aka XGA), 1280x720 (16:9, 1.77, WXGA), 1280x768 (15:9 1.66, aka 720p), 1280x1024 (5:4, 1.25, aka SXGA), and 1360x768 (16:9, 1.77, also aka WXGA). Post-november, nobody knows for sure. We know 1920x1080 is in there, but there's been no word on the other resolutions. Also note that many of the *supported* resolutions introduce distortion when viewed on a 360, as the 360 isn't aspect-ratio-aware.
There are, however, HDTVs out there in at least two other resolutions - 1440x900(16:10, 1.6), and 1680x1050(16:10, 1.6) - in common use in HDTV units today; other common resolutions include 1600x1200(4:3, 1.33), and 1920x1200(16:10, 1.6). It would be nice to see the November update support these, but we'll all have to just wait and see.
If you're playing PGR3 on your 360, you're playing at sub-720p resolution (1280x600, the "game" resolution for HD user) - you can't control what resolution the game renders at. The 360 does the job of upconverting whatever game resolution the game developer chooses to the chosen resolution of your display If you've got a native 720p display, you're seeing the 360 upscale to 720p output, which your TV then displays. If you run at 1080i, you see the 360 upscale to 1080i. The 360 does all the hard work, here.
The problem is that most HDTVs out there right now aren't native 720p. Or 1080p. They're LCDs, with internal resolutions different than any of those. They, themselves, have scaling hardware. So the 360's 720p display gets *upscaled* by the TV to match its internal resolution; the TV's upscaling basically destroys the image quality, because it's the second upscaling - a magnification of an already magnified image, it basically magnifies the magnification artifacts.
The only solution worth considering for most people running LCD HDTVs, especially if you know that your TV's native resolution is not actually 720p or 1080i, is to use a VGA cable and choosing the exact physical resolution of your LCD. Don't choose the biggest possible and let it downscale - you want the exact match.
Unfortunately, most of us now have a HDTV that isn't supported. 1440x900, for example. For us, our 360 can never produce the native resolution. We always re-scale. We always get artifacting. For us, we choose a lower resolution that most closely matches the aspect ratio: for 1440x900 users, and the closest aspect ratio to that supported by the XBOX 360 is 1280x768 (the true match would be 1280x800, which isn't supported). So, for most of us, we get crappy picture quality. It's better than using component cables, but still worse than the quality people expect when they hook up the VGA cable.
XBOX 360 1080p Support: The Facts
- 1080p support in games (native resolution renders) can happen, but developers were basically told at the same time as everyone else; Major Nelson's interviews mention that it could be 6-12 months before we see any games truly rendering at that resolution internally; it's also unclear that it will.
- 1080p support for "movies and games" via the VGA cable.
- 1080p will be supported on both the VGA and the Component cable.
- 1080p will not be supported for movies on Component. Microsoft doesn't believe this is an issue; everything they've seen on the market that does 1080p component also does VGA; they recommend using it. There's nothing MS can do about this - the copy protection of DVD and AACS basically prevent it.
- Emulated XBOX 1 games will be upconverted from their native resolution.
- Microsoft still believes that the "sweet spot" for internal rendering on the XBox 360 is 720p; that's the "right high-definition resolution" to enable lots of effects. (Source: Major Nelson Radio show #198)
- Microsoft states that "Resistance didn't look as good as Call of Duty at launch", and points out that the reason is because the 1080p resolution resistance is running at prevents it from running with all of the graphical fidelity of something like Gears of War. GoW is described as being a 720p game
- It doesn't do HDMI. 1080p doesn't require HDMI in the real world today, it's not necessary. What it *is* required for is non-VGA upscaling of video - because HDMI (with its copy protection support) is the only way to get upscaling without using VGA without violating CSS copy protection.
- 1080p output does not use more CPU/GPU in and of itself - additional cost is only paid when the internal renderer - the internal resolution of the game - is running at 1080p (or anything higher than 720p).
- HD-DVD output resolution is a tricky issue, supposedly. The ICT flag is not supported. The player will downconvert from 1080p to 540p (1080i) whenever it detects a lack of encryption in the chain. They claim this is a problem on the TV side, and even if they did have HDMI/HDCP in the 360, Microsoft's projections on TV sales through 2009 for HDTV say that 40% of the TVs sold wouldn't have them. In other words, they don't think it matters. Basically, you're not going to get full fidelity, and Microsoft doesn't think that's an issue for most of the market. That's not necessarily wrong, either. But in order for this to matter, the ICT flag has to get turned on in the content - and Microsoft is of the belief that this flag may never be turned on in content. If it ever is, you will be downscaled to 520p/1080i. Microsoft hasn't got a choice, on this. The downscaling for HD-DVD content only happens when the ICT flag is set on the content. It's specific to the HD-DVD disc, and it's chosen by the content producer, not the hardware guys.
- Native, true 1080p gaming will be supported, but the digital connection isn't on the 360. It won't be there. There's no HDMI/HDCP support. "There's nothing that prevents us from doing it, I'll never say never, but I would not stop myself from buying a 360 because of it because everyone out there with a 1080p TV today has a VGA port, so I just don't think there's any need to have one." (Albert, MajorNelson radio #168)
- Microsoft believes that third party games will be identical on both systems. "First party games are going to be interesting."
We Know What We Don't Know
The problem with all of this is that we don't know whether it solves our real problem. We can suspect and expect that it does - support for 1080p resolution for component and VGA ought to mean that there are other resolutions in-between 720p and 1080p supported for VGA users, just as VGA users get lots of resolutions to choose from at and below 720p. There's no guarantee, though.
The hope, and belief, is that with the Fall 2006 update, also called the November Update by some, is that those of us with HDTV's that aren't designed to exactly match 720 or 1080 resolutions - which is an awful lot - might finally see decent quality. The rule is, and has always been this: If you've got a HDTV with an LCD display, you ought to be using VGA.
Of course, none of this is going to fix the fact that most of us have also bought HDTVs designed for 16:10 movie viewing, and not 16:9 videogames. The 360 doesn't aspect-correct; it won't include black bars. Most of our TVs just scale up. So Lara Croft can either appear correct, need a diet, or be waaaay to anorexic, depending on which TV you bought to play it on, and what native resolution you chose. A lot of people get their VGA cable, find out the 360 doesn't support their native resolution, and just choose the highest on the list. That pretty much guarantees shitty picture quality, folks. You need to choose the highest resolution with the nearest aspect ratio. For me, that means 1280x768. Your mileage may vary. Do the math.
Conclusion
Sure, it sucks that it's taken this long. The problem has evolved - it's not something anyone foresaw, really. Hell, it's not even sure how the PS3 is going to cope with this - nobody has mentioned publically how the playstation is going to handle this native-resolutions issue. When HDTV came out, everyone believed that the problem was complicated - 720p, 1080i, 540p, and a million random labels that don't mean anything to most people. Nobody ever believed that we'd be in a much worse situation - where the HDTV resolutions supported by these televisions wasn't actually going to physically match the resolution on the display, and that we'd be fighting our televisions (some of which actually have a lag between getting the image and converting it; on some TVs, that upscaling has rendered FPSs unplayable.)
HDTV is not the solution everyone believed it was going to be. Not for gaming, at any rate; the problem is that HDTV video content is generally highly-antialiased, and most game content, even in the 360 era, is not. Aliasing at native resolution, when magnified, become highly visible artifacts on LCD HDTVs. Also, while many believed HDTV was going to be for the living room, many of us are playing these things a lot closer to the screen (and on smaller screens) than people envisioned - so we're seeing the warts a lot more clearly than people thought.
It's still not clear that Microsoft will fix the problem - gaming magazines and publications haven't been incredibly well educated on this issue, and so we're just not seeing the right questions being asked to know whether or not we can truly expect this problem to me fixed by the November Update. Because those same publications haven't known enough to ask Microsoft, you can obvioiusly also tell they haven't asked those same questions of Sony - so we could once again be in a situation where a shiny, new console ships and has no way of supporting our HDTVs without going through multiple scaling runs.
So, if you haven't already, go buy the VGA cable. Don't use component. Go and look up the native resolution on your display, and set that. If it doesn't support it today, choose the nearest resolution with the same aspect ratio. Pray that the November update fixes that. And don't think to yourself you'll get better quality out of component - you won't; what you might get is your TV downscaling a higher-resolution image, but then you're adding lag to your gameplay experience. Let the 360 do the work, use the VGA cable, choose the right resolution. For those with supported resolutions, it's the best possible gameplay experience. And because VGA users always get upscaled movies, it's always best to watch moves via VGA, not component.
Also, one final note: Games won't run slower just because you're running 1080p resolutions, because the resolution of the display has nothing to do with the resolution the game creates content at. Not before, not today, not tomorrow. This is one of those things that's fundamentally different about playing a game on your PC versus your console - on the PC, your monitor switches resolution and upscales. Here, your 360 does that internally for every game, and the developer always gets sole discretion to choose the resolution the game is running at, regardless of what you have hooked up to see it with.
For those buying an HDTV to play games on, this can't be stressed enough: If you're buying one today, always buy either a native resolution of 1280x720 or a native resolution of 1920x1080. Do so, and you'll never have to worry about any of this, regardless of what you watch. As long as you're buying a true, native resolution display for the resolution you'll watch content at, you never have to worry about upscaling getting in the way of the experience.
Further Reading
Most of this is sourced from public statements and the contents of Major Nelson's blog and radio show (specifically, the interview with Albert in show 198). Another good source of general information is the XBOX 360 high definition FAQ, which is a nice, basic primer. Its' awful basic, tho.
