Guerilla Games, the studio behind PlayStation 4 launch exclusive Killzone: Shadow Fall, has responded to the controversy surrounding the recent Digital Foundry report that discovered the game’s multiplayer mode drops its resolution to 960 x 1080 to bump the frame rate from 30 FPS to 60 FPS.
The response, posted as a blog post by studio producer Poria Torkan, details a "technique called ‘temporal reprojection’ that combines pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames to reconstruct a full 1080p image."
"If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native," Torkan said. "Games often employ different resolutions in different parts of their rendering pipeline. Most games render particles and ambient occlusion at a lower resolution, while some games even do all lighting at a lower resolution. This is generally still called native 1080p. The technique used in Killzone: Shadow Fall goes further and reconstructs half of the pixels from past frames."
In response to the community backlash, Torkan reassures that the studio "recognizes the community’s degree of investment on this matter, and that the conventional terminology used before may be too vague to effectively convey what’s going on under the hood. As such we will do our best to be more precise with our language in the future."
Despite cogging with a 960 x 1080 frame buffer under the hood on multiplayer, Killzone: Shadow Fall proved itself a fine beauty to drive on PS4. The game’s multiplayer mode sure ran smoothly, and it looked good to boot. Granted, it’s encouraging to see some clarification on the matter and hopefully fans of the series will find the content of the blog post valuable.
Do you think this revelation was overblown, or does Sony and Guerilla Games deserve the backlash? Give us a shout in the comments section below.
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