xbmc/xbmc — pull request #1467 by davilla (2012-09-23 01:15:29+00:00)
Title: add the ability to run a split gui/display resolution for embedded platforms.

This is transparent on desktop and is used primarily on embedded platforms where the GUI is not powerful enough to render GLES at 1080p with a decent fps but the hardware video decoders have no problem running at 1080p. This type of hardware typically has multiple display layers with a hw scaler to handle scaling/blending of the GUI to display resolution.

So we setup and run GLES at a lower resolution (ie, 1280 x 720) and configure the hw scaler to scale to the full 1920 x 1080 display resolution. This type of setup is used for amlogic, sigma and cex41xx. RaspberryPi seems to have a very strong GUI and can render the GUI at 1080p without problems.