Microsoft's Vrignaud: '1080 Meaningless This Generation'

Writing in his personal weblog, Microsoft director of games platform strategy, Andre Vrignaud (aka Ozymandias) has commented that he feels high definition video resolutions as high as 1080p will be “meaningless” for games during the oncoming generation of consoles. Currently the highest home standard in HD (high definition) video equipment, 1080p is shorthand for a variety of non-interlaced video modes. Sony has made much of the PlayStation 3’s ability to output at 1080p resolutions, but Vrignaud has stated that he feels developers will only target resolutions of 720p, in order to make parallel development of titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 easier. Vrignaud actually went further as part of his informal weblog post, by commenting that, “I'll stick my neck out and predict that that you won't see any 1080'x' games for the PS3 this year.” Discussing movie playback on HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats, Vrignaud also pointed out that most modern HD equipment displays content progressively even if the input is interlaced, making the 1080p resolution functionally irrelevant on current consumer hardware. Although the pros and cons of HD technology is notoriously complex and open to debate, detailed comments such as these, by such a relatively senior employee as Vrignaud, are becoming increasingly commonplace.