I could go on about how the graphics wars are stupid and wasteful things, but the truth is people care about this stuff. People care about this stuff to a surprising degree. So if you’re a gamer, expect to hear a lot of screaming/gloating that one system can run Call of Duty: Ghosts at 1080p and the other one can’t.
This is according to Mark Rubin, CoD producer and surprisingly blunt guy. You might remember him saying Call of Duty was a casual game.
“For Xbox One we’re 1080p upscaled from 720p,” confirmed Rubin, meaning the game will be output at 1080p (1920 x 1080) thanks to upscaling software, but is running natively at 720p (1280 x 720) at the rendering level.
“We’re native 1080p on PS4,” he went on to confirm. “We optimized each console to hit 60 FPS and the game looks great on both.”
In other words, they’ll pretty much be completely indistinguishable from each other unless you’re a professional graphics artist and have the training to spot something uprezzed from something that isn’t. Expect to see many, many claims of this training. And this might be a consistent trend, too, as Battlefield 4 will also be running natively at a higher resolution.
So, what’s going on? Why does Microsoft’s device have the lesser resolution when, by all accounts, the two systems are pretty much even on graphics? At a guess, it’s something on Microsoft’s end; they didn’t get the proper tools to the developers in time. Needless to say no developer, and certainly not Microsoft, will confirm that, but it seems unlikely Microsoft would put out a $500, bleeding-edge entertainment product and forget to support 1080p resolution.
Here is where an evil, evil person would tell you that you can make a “PS4” CoD frame look like a “Xbox One” CoD frame with a little monkeying in Photoshop, and he actually made it pretty passable with some slight messing with the contrast and using the Sharpen filter in a few minutes. But I am not an evil, evil person. At all.