This generation has had an awful lot of cheating with resolutions - and the mess of HDTV standards didn't help much either.
I think Microsoft stated at launch that every game released for the 360 had to support 720p at minimum. You'd think that would mean the game runs at 1280x720, but in many cases that's not true. They just take whatever resolution the game is actually at, upscale it on the way out, and call it 720p. Same goes for 1080p, although with maybe one or two exceptions the game is never natively running at 1920x1080. You can immediately tell a cheating game (especially on a 720p native TV) because it looks blocky and/or jagged.
It's utter BS, since it doesn't matter if the console is upscaling it or your TV is upscaling it. Technically playing a 480p DVD on your fancy 1080p could be called 1080p if that were the case, since your TV is upscaling it to fit. Lame? God yes.
The PS3 cheats too, although from what I gather its video card is not as well suited to full-blown upscaling as the 360, although it will happily stretch horizontally. So GT5 Prologue, which claims 1080p, does actually have 1080 vertical lines. It's just running at 920x1080, which is technically less than half the resolution of a full 1080p. Whoops.
I'd rather they just be honest, because at this point the 720ps and 1080ps on the boxes are meaningless. At least if you watch an HD-DVD or Blu-ray movie you know that when it says 1080p it means 1920x1080 and will look great on your native 1080p TV and not pixelated and chunky.
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