Over the years, gamers have gotten used to highly detailed games that drop frames and get distractingly choppy when the action gets too intense (a deep pain I've personally been suffering through since at least Gradius III on the SNES ). Now it seems some developers are toying with the idea of dropping a few pixels of resolution in those cases in order to keep the frame rate silky smooth.

The technique is called dynamic resolution scaling, and a recent analysis by Digital Foundry goes into some detail about how it works in Halo 5: Guardians. Basically, the developers at 343 have prioritized hitting 60fps consistently through the entire game, a big boon for a twitchy first-person shooter (and a first for the Halo series). The level of graphical detail in some game scenes, though, means that such a high frame rate can only be delivered at resolutions well below the Xbox One's highest 1080p standard.

Instead of just statically setting a low resolution ceiling for the entire game, though, Halo 5 dynamically changes the resolution based on the detail of the current in-game scene. This on-the-fly adjustment takes place on both the X and Y axes, with resolutions jumping from as low as 1152×810 to as high as 1536×1080 in Digital Foundry's analysis. The apparent on-the-fly change in resolution wasn't even noticeable to my eye during some recent testing.

While Digital Foundry says that "the game spends the overwhelming majority of its time well under full 1080p," this dynamic resolution scaling means that pixel counters can get the very best visual fidelity possible at any point without the usual frame rate jumpiness. The game also uses other tricks to preserve the overall frame rate, such as using less detailed, "half-rate" animations for far-off enemies (like many other games, Halo 5 also uses less-detailed polygonal models to save cycles when rendering far-off objects).

This isn't a completely new feature to gaming, even on the Xbox One. Earlier this year, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt dynamically upscaled from its default 900p resolution to a more detailed 1080p when possible. But Halo 5's system seems much more robust, operating on a sliding scale designed to squeeze as many pixels as possible from every single scene.

Other developers have shied away from similar resolution tweaking for their games, though. While working on the PS4 reboot of The Last of Us, Naughty Dog programmer Drew Thaler tweeted that while this kind of resolution scaling worked wonders in a fast-paced racing game like Wipeout, "[to be honest] racing games are special; it would probably look bad in most other game genres :)"

Overall, though, we're bullish on this technique for any genre where smooth, 60fps refresh rates are important, i.e., any genre where quick reflexes are involved. It's no secret that many games have had trouble consistently reaching the 1080p ideal on the latest generation of console hardware, especially on the Xbox One . Dynamic scaling and similar techniques, though, can allow games to look as good as possible during relatively simple scenes, while still animating smoothly during crowded and chaotic portions.

Making a game look as good as possible on static console hardware is always a difficult balancing act between resolution, frame rate, and the quantity and detail of the moving parts in a scene. Rather than forcing developers to pick one static maximum on all of those axes for an entire game, Halo 5 proves that some dynamic allocation can get the most out of set hardware at any one point.