Alan Wake‘s director of development Markus Mäki has confirmed that the Remedy masterpiece will indeed run at 720p.
Fears of it being otherwise were mounting over the weekend as gameplay videos from the game, posted online by a few game sites, were being examined by fans.
Posting on the game’s official forums relaying a message from Mäki, who’s currently grounded in Italy due to the volcanic ash cloud, was head of franchise development Oskari Häkkinen: “Modern renderers don’t work by rendering everything to a certain final on-screen resolution, but use a combination of techniques and buffers to compose the final detail-rich frames, optimizing to improve the visual experience and game performance.”
The message went on: “Alan Wake‘s renderer on the Xbox360 uses about 50 different intermediate render targets in different resolutions, color depths and anti-alias settings for different purposes. These are used for example for cascaded shadow maps from sun & moon, shadow maps from flashlights, flares and street lights, z-prepass, tiled color buffers, light buffers for deferred rendering, vector blur, screen-space ambient occlusion, auto-exposure, HUD, video buffers, menus and so on.”
“In the end all are combined to form one 720p image, with all intermediate buffer sizes selected to optimize image quality and GPU performance. All together the render targets take about 80 MB of memory, equivalent in size to over twenty 720p buffers.”
As of the videos’ existence in the first place, managing director Matias Myllyrinne has expressed his feelings, via Twitter of course, “Game journalism is not about playing a game in 10 minute segments and posting random quality videos on the net. Disappointed.”
