Bungie talks Halo 3 640p issue

Friday, in Bungie's Weekly Update, Luke Smith took on the Halo 3 640p resolution rumor head on and confirmed that Halo 3 does output natively at 1152x640 resolution and is up-converted by the Xbox 360 to either 720p or 1080p. But, before smoke comes spewing out of your ears because you feel cheated out of 80p, know that Bungie has a semi-good reason for reducing the pixel count ... high dynamic range lighting! Yes sir, during development the dev team calculated (through very geeky methods) that in order to make Halo 3 run smoothly and use two filters to create amazing HDR lighting effects they'd have to compromise and go with a slightly lower resolution. Bungie didn't tell this before, because they thought it wasn't all that important and didn't want the internets to blow it out of proportion (too late for that). Anyway, don't feel cheated about the resolution, because you have pretty HDR lighting to fill your 80p void and we know you couldn't tell the resolution difference anyway. Could you?