Black Rock's technical director revealed that the 720p requirement for Xbox 360 games has now been removed by Microsoft paving the way for developers to "trade-off between resolution and image quality as we see fit."
Black Rock's technical director David Jefferies said the reason is down to TV manufacturers equipping 720p LCD TV's with resolutions of 1366x768 rather than a true 720p resolution of 1280x720.
Since a TV will upscale the resolution to 720p regardless of how good or bad it looks, it's out of the developers control on what the final product will look. Developers will now be free to balance resolution with anti-aliasing to bring out a better picture quality across all sets. However, most TV's being released now are already above 720p thus negating the issue all together.
David Jefferies thanked Halo 3 for getting the ball rolling on the removal of the requirement, after Microsoft "waived" its 1152x640 resolution.
