Remedy said today:
"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.
Alan Wake's renderer on the Xbox360 uses about 50 different intermediate render targets in different resolutions, color 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 color 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."
Beyond3D appears to be somewhat confused as well. Most consider the opaque geometry framebuffer to be the "game resolution," which is 960x540 in the case of Alan Wake, but they do agree that there is more to Alan Wake than just that, which makes this entire situation sort of complicated... It isn't strictly 540p. But it isn't strictly 720p either.
Alan Wake, from Max Payne and Control creator Remedy, is a horror classic, prompting one player to buy 4,000 copies that don’t even work.
Kind of a goody story...
On a serious note, that is why I try activating gift cards asap. It's happened to me where the store didnt scan it right where the card was unusuable. Happened at Wally World.
Usually most of those redemption card have an expiry date on them. If they expired all buyer did was buy recycled paper. And some of those codes are country locked to certain countries. I buy a card from the States I can't use it in Canada.
Dumb and silly story. She wasted her money for no reason.
Is it really that hard to go to Steam or GOG. She spent $240, when its currently 70% off on GOG, and only costs $4.49.
Gee, I wonder, should I spend $240 on eBay, or $4.49 on GOG? 🙄
So in short she paid $240.00 assuming usd for a bunch on unactivated game codes.
I still don't understand why I guess cause there's not a physical version and she wanted something for a collection or art project.
Alan Wake 2 continues the writer's story, 13 years later.
Remedy has Alan Wake merch on sale, including a pretty blue thermos. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone according to plan, and many players who want a thermos find themselves without one, though it does appear that Remedy is attempting to fix things. Nevertheless, it has resulted in a lot of upset, illustrating just how much the thermos means to Alan Wake fans.
and we thought 576p was bad enough.
next Xbox game will be 480p.
All games have multiple buffers for different effects and these are at different resolutions by default to be efficient. There is the main opaque geometry buffer where you have the polygons and textures, the lightmap, shadow buffer, alpha buffer for transparencies, particle buffer, etc. These are usually never the same size as each other.
The most important one is the main opaque geometry buffer since it countains the polygons and textures, and determines image and texture quality. If you choose your opaque geometry buffer too low resolution, things such as enemies far away will be smaller than one pixel and you won't be able to see them. Also the polygon edges will be rougher and will need more extensive (and expensive) anti-aliasing. Texture detail will also suffer.
What the developer said confirms MazingerDUDE and Quaz51's findings that the main opaque geometry buffer is indeed at 540p. The other effect buffers contribute much less to the overall image, for example many of Killzone 2's secondary buffers such as particle and alpha buffers are 1/4th resolution, at 360p, but you'd never notice it unless you were specifically looking for it. However the lower resolution opaque geometry buffer will have the side effect of making everything blurry, just like the PS3 version of GTA4, which was at 640p. 540p will be even worse.
You can combine a 720p HUD (text on screen, crosshair, etc.) buffer with a 540p opaque geometry buffer and end up with a 720p image that you achieved by "composing various size buffers", but that won't truly make your image 720p, just like watching DVD's on an HDTV won't make them 720p/1080p.
TL;DR: Alan Wake is 540p.
WTF,fluctuate.ROFL makes me wonder if any games on 360 are real 720p lol
Makes sense, I'm sure all console games use multiple renderers. Very interesting, there is just so much about making games that we don't know about. Even though many of us claim to