DICE’s Johan Andersson confirmed via Twitter that Battlefield 3 on the Xbox 360 and PS3 will run at just less than 720p with hardly noticeable black bars on the top and bottom to fill what’s left.
And what’s left is a measly eight pixels at the top and eight pixels at the bottom of your screen. There are very few games on the console running at full (true) 720p – with most opting to upscale – so I’m not all that concerned.
Both consoles will run at 1280×704 with the lines removed to improve performance. The game still runs at 30FPS on the consoles compared to 60FPS on PC.
“[Battlefield 3] is 1280×704 on both PS3 and 360. Removing a few lines from 720p saves good performance and memory for us.”
“We have tiny eight-pixel black bars that often are invisible due to overscan – scaling would just ruin the picture.”