Ghosts (Xbox One/PS4) Resolution difference explained

Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin has spoken out about why the Xbox One and PS4 versions have different native resolutions.

Mark Rubin: In a way. I don’t know if I can point to one particular cause. Early on, we didn’t know where exactly the resolution of anything would fall because we didn’t have hardware or the software to support it. We tried to focus in on 1080p, and if we felt like we were on borderline of performance somewhere… We tried to make the best decision for each platform that gives you the best-looking game we could get and maintains that 60 frames a second.

There’s no specific, oh, well, the VO chat on Xbox took up so much resources that we couldn’t do 1080p native. There’s no definitive one to one per se cause and effect. It’s just an overall thing. We took each system individually and said, ‘okay, let’s make the best game for each system.’

I think both look great. Some people might notice if they had them right next to each other. Some people might not. The Xbox One is 1080p output, it’s just upscaled hardware wise.

It was a late decision, too. That call wasn’t made until a month ago.

It appears that the OS issues is responsible for some of the disparities between resolutions.

Rubin further confirmed that it is possible for a Call of Duty to run at 1080p natively but it may compromise the Frames per second.

Mark Rubin: It’s very possible we can get it to native 1080p. I mean I’ve seen it working at 1080p native. It’s just we couldn’t get the frame rate in the neighbourhood we wanted it to be.

And it wasn’t a lack of effort. It wasn’t that it was like last minute. We had the theoretical hardware for a long time. That’s the thing you get pretty quickly and that doesn’t change dramatically. It was more about resource allocation. The resource allocation is different on the consoles. That huge web of tangled resources, whether it’s threads-based or if it’s GPU threads or if it’s memory – whatever it is – optimisation is something that could go theoretically on forever.

SOURCE: EuroGamer