As a programmer who used to develop virtual and augmented reality systems for the military (and others), I can deeply respect the elegance of this solution. I started to pick up on it a bit last night when I was standing particularly close to my 42" TV (trying to get the Motion Master trophy), and woke up this morning to read this article.

The human brain has a limited capacity to process information (whether visual, auditory, or otherwise) and varying thresholds for "disturbing" those senses. Audio cannot ever stutter and video cannot change framerate during dynamic sequences... no game better displays the framerate issue than GTA IV on the PS3 -- sometimes drops even below 10 fps when there's a lot going on... and it's disorienting!

To have that level of framerate shift in a game with as much motion and action as WipEout would cause people to get ill from watching and cause severe physiological side effects... I applaud the engineering approach of recognizing that:

a) the times when you can't render at 1920x1080p60 are when there's a lot going on (visually and audibly)
b) those times are the most critical to maintain framerate and audio continuity
c) they're also the times when the brain is least likely to be trying to process detailed visual content
d) reducing horizontal resolution allows you to maintain framerate without disturbing the player

Horizontal resolution, particularly, is the least spatially sensitive part of the human visual system.

So, kudos to the graphics gurus at SL for picking this approach... I only wonder if Sony ever expected developers to do this (and provided an API to make it easy), or if somebody at SL came up with the system from scratch... whoever figured it out deserves a pat on the back!

/Andrew