Dat eighth-gen shading on sixth-gen assets and geometry budget.
With the OG screenshot utility, yes. In many ways it's actually substantially higher-quality than Halo 3 MCC; it's got 4xOGSSAA, object LOD is adjusted for the higher res, there's some AF, and bloom is switched from bilinear scaling to a much smoother implementation.
Unfortunately, the 360 also compresses the result into a low-quality jpeg. And you can't even use a capture card to grab the image as it's being tiled in; what's displayed on-screen is a low-resolution re-scaled version of the internal image, even if your console is set to output 1080p.
They were pushing more out of the normal maps in Halo 3 then the meager 640p resolution was suited for.
3D artists are typically told to fatten up the edge widths more on hard surface models than would be realistic on the real prop because the edges show up better on the normal map (and eventually the screen) when you model the prop with wider radius edges. The reasoning being that there are more pixels with varying normals in the bitmap and thus mip-mapping and uv seams dont eat as much into your normal map, (since that is exactly where your most important normal data is, on the edges where there are frequently UV seams. And it's particularly bad with hard surface assets back in the day where you often have to fight against the errors of an unsynced normal tangent basis between your baker and your renderer. you still have to fight it today with some popular renderers such as unity and unreal up until lately )
For Halo 3 they did things pretty sharp for some reason, I guess they weren't all that used to the HD era and producing assets for it going from the xbox.
Its a craft after all, and this kinda trick is learned from experience creating assets and seeing how they look when finally rendered on screen.
A side effect is that now on the xbox one the armor models are really nice and high res looking in a lot of places and there is enough resolution for the sharper edges in the normal maps to shine. plus there is actual antialiasing to smooth over the UV seams that are everywhere on hard surface models.
I mean, look at the edges of some of the armor in this pic:
Some of the specular glints you see off of the edges are maybe a pixel or two wide in 1080p even with AA and AF working in their favor.
On the 360, they may as well have not had made the high poly models and baked normals from them since the edges are modeled so thin that they barely show up. I always wondered how they ended up shipping it like that in Halo 3. They obviously had high poly models they worked on for weeks, and yet the normal maps practically don't show up on that aliasy final image, especially with its lack of decent Anisotropic filtering. seems like a wasted effort up until now, but it looks awesome on the xbone. I wonder if they were targeting a 720p+ final image when they were making those assets? early 360 dev hardware might have seemed more capable than what they ended up with.
Reach and Halo 4 were quite a bit better in this regard with normal mapped assets modeled in a much better suited way. Halo 1 anniversary campaign had some chunky ass edges, looked great.
