Ouch, despite of what Sony was telling us al along, it seems that Resistance: Fall of Man won’t support a 1080P mode after all. Insomniac company President Ted Price mentioned this information on his IGN weblog. A 1080P mode would take up a considerable amount of extra VRAM, which isn’t available. This doesn’t mean future games won’t support a 1080P mode, but due to limited development time the high resolution wasn’t feasible for this launch title.

Price explains that after they finished up a couple of their bigger levels and tried out the 1080P mode, it used too much VRAM and if they wanted to do this anyway they had to steal VRAM from some of the characters and environments. They felt it was a better idea to go with a 720P mode since that looks quite good on a 1080P TV as well.

Over the past few months we’ve told all of the enthusiast magazines and websites that we will TRY for 1080p. And indeed we did try. But when we began making our final discs we made the decision to release at 720p. Why? Native 1080p (versus 720p scaled to 1080p) uses much more VRAM than 720p. When we finished up a few of our bigger levels at the very end of the development process we realized that we would have had to steal VRAM from some of our characters and environments to run in native 1080p. Some of you who aren’t familiar with hardware in general may be asking “So didn’t you say you freed up more space?” Well yes, but VRAM and disc space are two completely separate things. VRAM/RAM is the 512Mb of dynamic memory allocated to game assets at runtime versus the 25Gb or so of permanent storage on a single-layer Blu-Ray.

While we’re on the subject of High Definition resolutions, they tested the game on a Standard Definition TV quite thoroughly to make sure it won’t suffer from unreadable text like Dead Rising did on the Xbox 360. They realise not every customer has the money to buy an expensive HDTV.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the game also looks really good on standard NTSC (480i) TVs. I think it’s easy to ignore the fact that not every consumer owns an HD TV. But we made sure to thoroughly test Resistance for text legibility and overall contrast on different types of NTSC sets.

Price also mentions that the game won’t be 20GB in size like Sony wanted us to believe, in fact it’s closer to 16GB. He explains that they were up to 20GB at one point, but he clearly states that was during development and it was not the final size. What they did to make it smaller was removing the PAL movies and just converting the NTSC movies on the fly which seemd to look good enough on PAL TVs.

Why did we bother when we had so much space to work with? It simply saved us time when burning discs. When you’re making revs every day and distributing them to a large test team, saving burn time is crucial. We could have left the PAL movies on disc and not improved compression to keep the size around 20Gb but that would have been inefficient and a little disingenuous. We don’t want to pad the disc just to get it to a certain size. Whatever the game needs is what we put on the disc.

Resistance: Fall of Man is a launch title for the PS3 and will ship November 17th.