Bungie Stole Your Pixels; Is Keeping Them

Filed in archive News on September 30, 2007

Certain segments of the Internet population are in an uproar that Halo 3 doesn't run at the resolution it should. What does that even mean? I don't know either, man. My TV is square. It's a big deal to some people, though - doesn't Microsoft know how much they paid for those HDTVs? Here's what Bungie had to say in response:

One item making the interwebs rounds this week was the scandalous revelation that Halo 3 runs at "640p" which isn't even technically a resolution. However, the interweb detectives did notice that Halo 3's vertical resolution, when captured from a frame buffer, is indeed 640 pixels. So what gives? Did we short change you 80 pixels?



In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152x640 image and the scaled 1280x720, it's practically impossible to discern the difference. We would ignore it entirely were it not for the internet's propensity for drama where none exists. In fact the reason we haven't mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings.