Some games just won't scale or allow resolution changes

do you run the game in full screen or in windowed mode

if your run the game in windowed mode the resolution will be locked to the monitor set resolution.

some game as a feature that allow you to upscale or downscale the game resolution this feature (usually called scaling) would allow you to scale the game rendering resolution

if its not present the solution would be to

a. change the monitor resolution prior of launching the game

or

b. set the game in full screen mode (in the game video setting) then you should be able to set its resolution

You can change your resolution to 720p if that's what you're looking to play on.

You can - but won't change how the game plays, it will just make it look worse.

If you change the resolution to 720P it won't make a game run at that resolution. The console will just scale down to fit the screen. The game will still run internally at whatever the developers set it to. Hence the performance will be exactly the same.

That bit under Resolution, is Resolution Scaling. This should be set to Yes as it allows the game to change it's rendering resolution on the fly and can help keep to the target FPS you've set.

As I said before, the only way MW2/MW3 are "faster" when at 480p is if the MW2/MW3 engines are shifting to rendering internally at 640x480 instead of a fixed resolution.



Normally, 360 games render internally at a fixed resolution. The Xenos GPU scales that output to match whatever the display resolution is. The scaling is "free" in terms of resources.



For a game to perform better at a lower resolution, the game must be changing the rendering resolution.



Replacing the HDMI cable won't make any difference. You're hitting a limitation of the game.

Not going to change how awesome the game is to play. Resolution is overrated with the Xbox's up scaling capability.