Alan Wake runs in 720p, Remedy not happy over recent leaks

Remedy's confirmed that Alan Wake will run in 720p throughout the thriller, and not 520p as previously thought over the weekend.

Development Manager at the Finnish studio Markus Maki said on its community forums:

"Modern renderers don't work by rendering everything to a certain final on-screen resolution, but use a combination of techniques and buffers to compose the final detail-rich frames, optimizing to improve the visual experience and game performance. Alan Wake's renderer on the Xbox360 uses about 50 different intermediate render targets in different resolutions, color depths and anti-alias settings for different purposes.

"These are used for example for cascaded shadow maps from sun & moon, shadow maps from flashlights, flares and street lights, z-prepass, tiled color buffers, light buffers for deferred rendering, vector blur, screen-space ambient occlusion, auto-exposure, HUD, video buffers, menus and so on.

"In the end all are combined to form one 720p image, with all intermediate buffer sizes selected to optimize image quality and GPU performance. All together the render targets take about 80 MB of memory, equivalent in size to over twenty 720p buffers."

Meanwhile, Remedy managing director Matias Myllrinne expressed his disappointment over the weekend of two videos, from the game that leaked out, where the resolution argument originated from.

"Game journalism is not about playing a game in 10 minute segments," he tweeted, "and posting random quality videos on the net. Disappointed."

Alan Wake releases on May 14 in Europe and the UK, with a May 18 release in the US for Xbox 360.