Word on the street is Microsoft has thrown down the gauntlet and demanded that Bungie make Halo 3 run at a true 1080p at a constant 60fps. They don’t want none of this upscaled 1080p junk, they want the real deal.

If I remember correctly, Microsoft has stated that it has no intentions of making 1080p games, and only enabled it so third party developers could use it if they wanted. A little too much pressure from the PS3 perhaps?

An inside source told PlayThree:

Microsoft realise that with the history making manpower and resources they have invested into this single product, if it can’t be done on Halo 3, then the Xbox 360 can’t do it at all. [Shane Kim]wants Halo 3 in 1080p to be proof of the Xbox’s power.

If Shane Kim says so, I guess Bungie has to work with it. I can’t really see this working out though, especially with the Xbox 360 Core not having a hard drive to cache data.

Some more information provided:

• Bungie now have an internal test build of Halo 3 running at true 1080p at 60fps. This is not finalised code there are performance issues to optimise.
• Bungie’s No1 priority is that Halo 3 will be 100% compatible with the Xbox 360 Core (which has no hard drive.) In the largest levels with max players there is some lag, a change to 30fps might be necessary to maintain high performance
• True 1080p wont be available in the public beta next month, but the Beta will be used to gauge related issues.
• Some voices at Bungie felt that it would have been better to run Halo 3 at 720p and then upscale to 1080p
• Shane Kim thinks that a change to upscaled 1080p is ‘unthinkable’
• The next true Halo sequel (Halo 4?) will use a new game engine and depending on everything, could be a launch title for the new Xbox in ‘Fall’ 2010/11.
• A semi-sequel to Halo 3 is a possibility, it would use the Halo 3 engine. But this is most likely going to be new weapons/levels/vehicles.