One of the foremost divisive elements for gamers surrounding the imminent launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One revolves around screen resolution, especially in games like Call of Duty: Ghosts. The Activision shooter runs at a local 1080p on PS4, but only 720p on Xbox One. Speaking with Sony president Shuhei Yoshida at a PS4 review event in Ny, he said that there’s a pragmatic reason developers aim for 1080p: “I do not believe any team is solely fixated on 1080p, it’s only 1 of the choices…but [1080p] games let you be more precise and a more in-depth gamer. That’s clearly the ease.”
Yoshida offered an example specializing in Killzone: Shadow Fall. “You immediately notice the variation in comparison to playing most games on PS3, like [the unique] Killzone which was rendered at 720p. You could clearly see the enemy within the fog, and with the accuracy of the DualShock 4 dual analog sticks, you possibly can aim and shoot at enemies with pixel-perfect accuracy.”
Posing an analogous question to Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS4 and director of Knack, he said, “Resolution does make a difference. One point of bewilderment is that individuals say, ‘Oh, you won’t notice the variation since you can’t resolve individual pixels unless you’re very near to the television set.’ But although you’re taking a 1080p image and scale it all the way down to 720p, it looks better. That’s called supersampling. It’s a really specific quality graphics technique.”
“In Knack, as an instance, there isn’t any 720p mode,” he continued. “If you’re playing on a 720p HD TV, we’re just scaling the 1080 down, and it looks better than if we had produced that image at 720p. All the details of the scene are far more visible for this reason.”
But for some games, higher resolution can come at a price. For the PlayStation 4 review of CoD: Ghosts, Giant Bomb editor Jeff Gerstmann wrote that he experienced “a handful of noticeable dips in its frame rate.” However, GameSpot reviewer Shaun McInnis didn’t experience similar issues. Gerstmann wrote later that an upcoming patch from Infinity Ward may solve the problem.
To explain, Cerny said, “Every developer is doing a trade-off between framerate and backbone, and that they do this according to the sport experience they are attempting to create. Typically the fighting games and the driving games like to be at 60 due to the twitch aspects of the gameplay, so they’re a lot more sensitive to framerate. The alternative genres then, are likely to have a little more freeform. Specifically observing the launch titles for PlayStation 4, most of them are at 1080p. There are a number of framerates.”