For Your Enjoyment Folks

it's shaping up to be one of the most beautiful cross-gen games in development.

So, the stutter in Destiny isn't actually a reduction in overall framerate, but frame-timing issues, and they say Halo's 3 and ODST had the same problem. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a huge part of why Halo 3's "controls feel bad."

"There was always a lingering sense that the studio never fully delivered on the full promise of its last-generation vision, with sub-720p resolutions and other visual compromises preventing the art from truly shining."

Was there? I don't think I ever felt that way at the time, and it sure is an easy thing to say in hindsight, when we've already seen what later products can look like. I bet we could say the same thing about almost any other high-budget project of the past two decades. Anyway, I doubt that 1080p will be relevant to me, because I will no doubt be playing this on a crappy, old TV.

The time lapse video is really cool, but I wonder why the cloud layers are frequently moving in different directions. Looks strange to me.

So, the stutter in Destiny isn't actually a reduction in overall framerate, but frame-timing issues, and they say Halo's 3 and ODST had the same problem. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a huge part of why Halo 3's "controls feel bad."

Halo 2 had this problem as well. I don't know about Halo.

These games were output in 480i though, so it was more noticeable. You'd have a rendered frame be on the even, then odd field of a frame, making a perfectly progressive image. Sometimes you'd get what they are talking about, and it'd delay a field, resulting in the rendered frame being displayed on the odd field of one frame, and the even of the next. Then it'd look interlaced and disgusting on a computer.

Halo 2 had this problem as well. I don't know about Halo.

These games were output in 480i though, so it was more noticeable. You'd have a rendered frame be on the even, then odd field of a frame, making a perfectly progressive image. Sometimes you'd get what they are talking about, and it'd delay a field, resulting in the rendered frame being displayed on the odd field of one frame, and the even of the next. Then it'd look interlaced and disgusting on a computer.

Are you sure that it was actually a frame-pacing issue (i.e. stuff like even-odd-even of one frame followed by just the odd of the next frame, before going on to another frame) and not simply poor deinterlacing or regular performance hitches? Even normal slowdown (i.e. a frame being displayed for one extra field) would cause field alignmeny issues, but isn't quite the sort of stutter we're talking about.

I've seen spikes in Halo's 1 and 2, and pauses at load zones, but they don't feel like they have a microstutter problem.

Was there? I don't think I ever felt that way at the time, and it sure is an easy thing to say in hindsight, when we've already seen what later products can look like.

There absolutely was among a lot of people.

Halo's 3, ODST, and Reach have all been ripped apart since their launches for their image quality. Halo 3 was running at a pretty low resolution with no anti-aliasing of any kind (and although the jaggies are usually what get called out, the game has loads of specular aliasing). Reach's choice of temporal AA was seemingly a little ambitious on a seventh-gen machine, resulting in a slightly soft image when not in motion (yay Quincunx resolve), no AA when in motion, and occasionally ghosting when the algorithm decides to blend pixels that it shouldn't.

Anyway, I doubt that 1080p will be relevant to me, because I will no doubt be playing this on a crappy, old TV.

1080p will look better than 720p even if you're playing on an SD CRT. Downsampling results in a cleaner, more stable image with better-filtered textures and less aliasing.

Was there? I don't think I ever felt that way at the time, and it sure is an easy thing to say in hindsight, when we've already seen what later products can look like.

There was indeed. See the Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST tech analyses for examples of this.