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Pixel counters (a way of determining the resolution of a game) have come to the conclusion that upcoming Xbox 360 exclusive Alan Wake runs at a resolution vastly inferior to 720p.
We’re not talking a minor drop in resolution, but a significant fall from 1280×720 to only 960×547, albeit with 4xMSAA.
Angered by the revelation, fans have been calling on developer Remedy to explain what’s going on, and after a bit of a wait because of the pesky volcanic ash, Markus Mäki, Director of Development obliged.
“Modern renderers don’t work by rendering everything to a certain final on-screen resolution, but use a combination of techniques and buffers to compose the final detail-rich frames, optimizing to improve the visual experience and game performance,” explained Mäki.
He added: “Alan Wake’s renderer on the Xbox360 uses about 50 different intermediate render targets in different resolutions, colour depths and anti-alias settings for different purposes. These are used for example for cascaded shadow maps from sun & moon, shadow maps from flashlights, flares and street lights, z-prepass, tiled colour buffers, light buffers for deferred rendering, vector blur, screen-space ambient occlusion, auto-exposure, HUD, video buffers, menus and so on. In the end all are combined to form one 720p image, with all intermediate buffer sizes selected to optimize image quality and GPU performance. All together the render targets take about 80 MB of memory, equivalent in size to over twenty 720p buffers.”
Make of that what you will.
The game’s scheduled for release across Europe on May 14.
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