Battlefield 3 fills to 720p on console
Uses black lines top and bottom of picture.
Console Battlefield 3 uses black lines at the top and bottom of the screen to fill a 720p resolution, DICE rendering boffin Johan Andersson has revealed.
This has helped improve performance.
"[Battlefield 3] is 1280x704 on both PS3 and 360," tweeted Andersson. "Removing a few lines from 720p saves good performance and memory for us."
"We have tiny eight-pixel black bars that often are invisible due to overscan - scaling would just ruin the picture," Andersson explained in response to a question by Digital Foundry.
As a result, Battlefield 3 still runs at a native 720p.
Many current generation games go far below 720p and opt to upscale the difference.
Call of Duty: Black Ops ran in 1040x608 on Xbox 360 and in 960x544 on PS3, according to the incredible library of game resolutions on the Beyond3D forum. Black Ops also ran at 60 frames-per-second, however - Battlefield 3 will run at 30FPS.