- Anonymous101
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If you were aware of the jaggies and lack of crispness in Halo 3, it's partly because of it's smaller 640p native resolution (the difference between it and 720p is almost negligible), a step that Bungie took to incorporate their advanced lighting engine and HDR. Halo 3 uses dual framebuffers to blend a full range of true HDR lighting, as well as to squeeze other things into the game that other developers wouldn't dream of.
A lot of lessons were learned in Halo 3's development, but can there be a more efficient way to include the same amount if not more content than in Halo 3? If Reach were to be developed in native 720p, a lot of workarounds would need to be taken to include global illumination and HDR with local, moving lights. Because of the complexity of HDR, it is very difficult to run it at the same time as anti aliasing, and sometimes even basic texture filtering. Rendering with HDR can also take hits to the performance - the lighting was very complex in Halo 3, why wouldn't it be for Reach - meaning that the development team might once again have to lower the vertical resolution and separate the HDR and LDR values using dual framebuffers, while sacrificing detail and basic anti aliasing.
If the lighting and materials of Reach are as complex as those in Halo 3, it could mean that Bungie is developing at a vertical resolution lower than 720p to conserve performance and to have true HDR once again, which isn't a bad thing, but it might mean that the game might not look and feel as sharp as some may have hoped.