Wow Retina iPad 3 Wallpapers work with the iPad 2

[gorskiegangsta]

I think the question is more how does the wallpaper get kept in memory. I would expect it gets rendered to a 1024x768 bitmap and kept seperate to the original image, considering when I imported backup from my old ipad it imported low res wallpaper with it.

That is correct.

Agreed. What's being stored and what's being displayed are 2 very different things.

The iPad only stores those 786432 pixels that are being displayed in the 1024x768 frame in memory. Same happens with images embedded in webpages, the iPad scales them down automatically to conserve RAM, and the only way to view them full size is to hold and save to library.