Microsoft games director claims '1080' meaningless
The director of games at Microsoft has written on his personal blog that '1080' for gamers is meaningless. Though the Playstation 3 will output at 1080p, Andre Vrignaud says that most games will stick at 720p because of developers wanting to release games for both PS3 and Xbox. He predicts that there won't be any 1080i/p games for the PS3 this year.
He seems to be making a statement about 1080p in general (it's hyped) rather than simply for gaming, though this is the main emphasis. He quotes an article from Home Theatre Magazine which describes pull-down (basically, getting 24 frames to display on a 60Hz TV), and says that the main difference between 1080i and 1080p is where the de-interlacing is done.
He also manages to get a mention of the difference in encoding quality between HD DVD and Blu-ray (he's not going to side with Blu-ray, is he).
Closing, he says: "To sum up, don't get sucked into all the 1080p hype. Just make sure you have a recent HDTV that de-interlaces 1080i signals correctly and you'll be just fine."
An interesting read that goes beyond the realm of high-def gaming.
