So exactly how important is a title’s resolution? Well, considering all the hype over it for some of the upcoming titles on next generation consoles, we assume it’s "very important." Even Sony agrees, saying that taking up the resolution to 1080p for titles will offer users the option to be more precise and a better game.
Speaking to GameSpot at a recent PS4 review event, SCE Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida discussed as to why most developers target a 1080p resolution for their titles. He stated: “I don’t think any team is just fixated on 1080p, it’s just one of the options…but [1080p] games allow you to be more precise and a better gamer. That’s clearly the benefit.”
Taking Killzone: Shadow Fall as an example, Yoshida added that fans will immediately notice “the difference compared to playing most games on PS3, like [the original] Killzone which was rendered at 720p. You can clearly see the enemy in the fog, and with the accuracy of the DualShock 4 dual analog sticks, you can aim and shoot at enemies with pixel-perfect accuracy.”
Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS4 and director of Knack, was also pitched the same question regarding the importance of graphic resolution for titles. Cerny stated: “Resolution does make a difference. One point of confusion is that people say, ‘Oh, you won’t notice the difference because you can’t resolve individual pixels unless you’re very close to the TV set.’ But even if you take a 1080p image and scale it down to 720p, it looks better. That’s called supersampling. It’s a very specific quality graphics technique.”
Again, taking Knack as an example to support his statement, Cerny stated that the game currently has no 720p mode. “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 of the details of the scene are much more visible as a result.”
Next, on the difference between the framerate and resolution for Call of Duty: Ghosts, Cerny stated that every developer is maintaining “a trade-off between framerate and resolution, and they do that based on the game experience they are trying to create.”
“Typically the fighting games and the driving games want to be at 60 because of the twitch aspects of the gameplay, so they’re much more sensitive to framerate. The other genres then, tend to have a bit more freeform. Specifically looking at the launch titles for PlayStation 4, most of them are at 1080p. There are a variety of framerates,” he added.
Sony’s PlayStation 4 is currently scheduled to release on Nov. 15 in North America and Nov. 29, 2013 in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
