The game has ”tiny eight-pixel black bars” top and bottom that are ‘often invisible’ due to overscan. Scaling the resolution would ”just ruin the picture.”
Many current releases don’t manage 720p resolution as they instead upscale. Battlefield 3 ”is 1280x704 on both PS3 and 360. removing a few lines from 720p saves good perf & memory for us”, twittered DICE’s Johan Andersson.
”We have tiny eight-pixel black bars that often are invisible due to overscan - scaling would just ruin the picture,” he explained. Just for reference purposes: Call of Duty: Black Ops ran at 1040x608 on Xbox 360, and even lower on PS3 at 960x544.
Battlefield 3 achieves a solid 30 frames per second on console, assures DICE. Activision’s Call of Duty franchise sticks with 60 frames per second thanks to lower resolution. Battlefield 3 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC October 25th in the US, 28th in EU.