Xbox 360 games already feeling the HD Squeeze?

I've been speculating for a while now that people with non-HD TVs might actually end up getting the best gameplay out of the Xbox 360, depending on how the hardware handles the rendering. Why? Because with all the extra work being done to output at 720p, I figured that holding a steady framerate might be tricky, or even impossible.

Turns out I was half-right. Already one of the Xbox 360 launch titles has been "caught" putting out a 1024x600 screenshot, far less than the 1366x720 needed to qualify for 720p, because Bizzare Creations couldn't get the game to a stable framerate at full-res. The half-right comes in because the hardware apparently scales the game up to 720p automatically (probably the same thing they're doing for backwards compatability). So running your games in 480i probably wouldn't yield any performance benefits.

The good news, if there is any, is that launch titles frequently aren't using the full power of the hardware, which is usually starting to become truly tapped in about the third year. Odds are, Bizzare just didn't have the time to fully optimize the game, giving a lower-res presentation. And the fact is, most people will never notice.