So-called next-gen games have gotten more and more demanding over time. More realistic, and more visually-stunning scenes demand more performance, something consoles can only offer at a limited level with their limited resources at hand (see RAM, GPU, and so forth). From day one, Sony announced WipEout HD as true 1080p title. But sadly so, that's not quite the case. Only most of the time Sony's futuristic racer runs at 1080p as Richard Leadbetter has found out at his DigitalFoundry blog. Instead of plaguing the gamer with slow-downs or momentarily disabled visual effects in the game, WipEout HD comes with a clever solution to a seemingly complicated problem, the 1080p console dilemma. WipEout HD's answer to that is frame-by-frame scaling to keep a steady 60fps at--for most of the time--native 1080p.

True HD in 1080p not only means that the final video output ought to be 1920x1080 but that the game's native resolution (the one that it runs at internally) should also sponsor that exact same resolution, 1080p. Games like GTA 4, just to name one example, upscales to a HD resolution from a lower native resolution [To be exact: On the PS3 GTA 4 runs at native "640p" which is not considered HD at all. In contrast to that, the Xbox 360 version runs at a native HD resolution of 720p]. That's also the reason why GTA's picture quality wears a slight veil of blurredness on both next-gen consoles.

How does Sony Liverpool achieve a constant 60fps at 1920x1080 with their great-looking racer on the Playstation 3 though? Instead of causing a slow down in the game itself, they let WipEout HD recognize, on a frame-by-frame basis, whether the rendering of a scene will involve performance loss. If that is the case, the game chooses to down-scale that frame's native resolution. At a constant game speed of 60 fps, the player will hardly notice the lightning-quick resolution-switching, though: from a maximum native resolution of 1920x1080 (picture 1) to, for example, 1550x1440 (picture 2) to a utmost minimum of 1280x1024 (picture 3), which is still much better than 720p (1280x720), the game always picks the best one depending on the current scene at hand with the target to always aim for the full 1080p. Sadly though, this can involve some minimal screen-tearing at times as can be seen in picture 3 above.

In more techie-speak by DigitalFoundry's Richard Leadbetter:

The action-oriented racing game WipEout HD, developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (Studio Liverpool), is available via Playstation Network for $19.99 (£11.99) on the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system.