Bungie has revealed that the upcoming Halo: Reach will be bending the Xbox as far as it'll bend and they are using every advantage of everything on the CPU and GPU, and every bit of memory in order to produce the look of Reach.  
 
 
 
In an interview with Edge magazine, the magazine has been discussing with the developers the new engine Bungie is using to produce the upcoming smash hit "Halo: Reach":  
Edge: What’s been the main enabler for the various improvements you’ve made in Reach?  
Marcus Lehto: It’s a variety of things. It’s not more time - that’s for certain! We had better artists, more staff capable of doing better things, we’ve been learning, improving our skills and learning how to push better looking things in our engine, and of course our engine’s been improving radically.  
Joseph Tung: We took a different approach to the 3D art pipeline compared to Halo 3. It’s yielded significantly better results.  
ML: We are definitely bending the Xbox as far as it'll bend, taking every advantage of everything on the CPU and GPU, and every bit of memory in order to produce the look of Reach beyond anything of Halo 3. We're pushing it as far as we can go. With every iteration we understand what more we can exploit with the hardware.