I've already posted this in the GTA 4 official thread, but I thought it might be slightly more pertinent here. Basically, I think something might be wrong with my 360, and I noticed it while playing GTA 4.
It was running perfectly fine yesterday. There weren't any horrible framerate problems, and the jaggies were mostly unnoticeable. But today, after switching my HDMI cable out for a component video cable, it's looked and performed horridly. While switching the cables, I was suspending the 360 in the air vertically, and I might have... I don't know... inadvertently waggled it a little while I was switching them, but I don't think that movement was nearly enough to damage it. Yet, the game looked and played starkly different in 720p over component video than it did in 720p over HDMI. It was blurry, I was constantly seeing objects pop-up, and the shadow dithering looked about 100 times worse. Occasionally, the framerate would slow down significantly, and at one point, the game stopped completely for a split second before returning to a normal frame rate. I tried using the HDMI cable again to see if switching the cables had caused the problem, even though I thought that seemed like a strange concept, but while my 360 was connected through HDMI, the game still seemed to perform differently than it had yesterday. The aliasing was much more prominent than it had been before, and again, the pop-up was very bad, although strangely enough, it wasn't as bad as it was while the 360 was connected through component video cables.
So, I have a few questions.
Is my 360 on its death bed?
If I am just imagining that it looks worse through HDMI than it did yesterday, then why is it that it's also performing blatantly horrible through component video cables? Why the hell would that make any difference whatsoever in image quality, let alone performance?