If I had to choose between greater rendering effects with lighting & motion, or have ridiculouly high resolution, I'll settle for lower resolution every time. Having seen the evolution of PC games, the reason hardly more clearer. High-resolution gaming (1600x1200) has been possible for some time, but it didn't bring any real advantage. If anything, it only allowed you to see the low-polygon count and shape cracking more clearly. It wasn't until recently that anti-aliasing and higher-poly models have made gaming look much better. Unsurprisingly, max resolution hasn't gone up much, if at all. Today's 1280x1024 totally blows away 1280x1024 from 3 years ago.
Then you or someone is going to have to explain this situation.
I have an image in 1920x1080. I display it on a 1920x1080 display. I apply 4x antialiasing. What does the image do, at the pixel level?
For a static image, you'd see some improvment, but you'd have to really look for it. Anti-aliasing is best used -- in this case -- for full motion video. A car on the screen will not occupy the full 1920x1080 screen, but just some portion of it. Also, the car does not have straight lines, but is a collection of curved surfaces.
As these surfaces move, the pixels of the car start to occupy the next pixel locations. If this were to happen normally, the car's color would "pop" into the next pixel. If you were to watch the hood of a car slowly rise in your field of view, it's edge would flicker or crawl as individual pixels changed color. This can best be seen when watching elevated telephone wires (maybe regular TV shows would show this better), where they flicker as the camera pans across the screen. This twitter effect is called "aliasing", where false occurences of the image appear in the wrong places (although they're right next to each other).
With anti-aliasing, that line, that border between the background color and the car's color, does not change from one pixel to the next. Instead, it occupies multiple pixels, with a fade between one and the other. It ususally takes place across only a few pixels, but this greatly smooths the transition between the car's color and the background color. The end result seems slightly out of focus if you're 6" from the screen, but it adds so much to the realism of the image when you watch it at normal viewing distances.
Examples:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing
http://www.widearea.co.uk/designer/anti.html
I hope you don't take that the wrong way or anything, I just can't tell if I'm being complemented or being made fun of.
