Remedy has responded to online claims that upcoming Xbox 360 exclusive Alan Wake runs with a sub-HD resolution, releasing a statement saying that “modern renderers don’t work by rendering everything to a certain final on-screen resolution”.
Despite a review version of Alan Wake being sent out by Microsoft to the games media with a strict embargo that expires in early May, some websites have run videos and taken screenshots from which pixel counters reckon that the game’s native resolution is 960×540. This appears to be a somewhat different state of affairs when compared with early Wake footage we took a look at back in August last year, which was definitely a native 720p.
Initial comments from Remedy expressed dissatisfaction with unauthorised movies, which it said were captured at 960×540, suggesting that they made the game look worse than it actually is. However, it’s clear that the resolution analysis was actually performed on shots from German website videogameszone.de and the screens themselves were clearly taken at 720p settings. These shots have now been removed.
Posting on the Alan Wake community forums, Remedy’s Markus Maki says that today’s renderers use “a combination of techniques and buffers to compose the final detail-rich frames, optimising 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, colour depths and anti-alias settings for different purposes.”