That's because CGI movies are rendered by farms of computers, taking hours at a time to render a single scene. In other words, NOT REAL TIME. And to answer your question, yes, 1080p is absolutely needed. The difference between 720p and 1080p is night and day, for anyone who's not blind and/or trolling system wars. That's why all those CGI movies also look better in 1080p than 720p. Just like... literally everything looks better in 1080p than 720p. It's over twice as many pixels. It's not hard to understand. If the next Playstation and Xbox have ANY games that aren't being rendered in 1080p native... well that will just be beyond pathetic.

[QUOTE="PernicioEnigma"]What's the point in having detailed games if it's running at a resolution too low to even see that detail?[/QUOTE]

Exactly. Dark Souls is a perfect example. It's certainly not a "graphics king" kind of game, even on PC, in HD, but it's shocking how much detail there is in the textures, that's completely invisible in the PS3/360 versions. You put the game on PC, give it a quick tweak to allow it to render in 1080p and, without any other alterations, all the sudden you see quite a bit of great little details, that looked like they were coated in vaseline before. The artists involved in the game drew up some beautiful, highly detailed models/textures/etc., but that sub-HD resolution is literally just not enough pixels to show all the detail that's already there.

Some people really seem to think that effects and texture details are more important than resolution, when it comes to making a game look good. That's totally ass-backwards. Obviously the effects and details help, but without high resolution, all the effects and details in the world are meaningless and might as well be invisible.