Guerrilla Games has revealed details on the upcoming PlayStation 4 Pro edition of Horizon Zero Dawn, showcasing the benefits that 4K and 1080p TV users can enjoy when the action-RPG hits stores early next year.
Horizon Zero Dawn will support numerous additional details in the natural environment, as showcased during the PS4 Pro reveal event, plus HDR features.
"We normally have to do a lot of work in the engine to take an internal high dynamic range image and then make it suitable to be displayed on a normal," said Guerrilla Games’ Technical Director, Michiel van der Leeuw. "A lot of colour fidelity gets lost in the process. If you own an HDR-enabled TV, we don’t have to lose that data and you’re looking at the image in its full glory, with brighter and deeper colours, more contrast and vibrancy, in its pristine state. The benefits are truly awesome."
Horizon Zero Dawn PS4 Pro details: 1080p
"We’re able to offer far better image quality," explained van der Leeuw. "We’ve got a number of techniques at our disposal. The most logical one is supersampling. This is a very high-quality anti-aliasing technique, which basically means we internally render at a higher resolution (close to 4K) before shrinking it down to the final 1080p resolution.
"As our internal calculations are done at a resolution much higher than 1080p, more detail survives before we shrink it down to 1080p, resulting in smoother edges – virtually no jaggies – and a more stable image.
"We’re also looking at enhancing the quality of our shadow maps and increasing the quality of our anisotropic filtering. This is a technique which increases the quality of texture sampling, resulting in more detailed environment textures. We still have to tweak these elements of the 1080p output quality for the final game, but we have quite a bit of power yet to play with."
Horizon Zero Dawn PS4 Pro details: 4K
"Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 Pro will fully support users with 4KTVs, outputting at a much higher resolution," added van der Leeuw. "We’re rendering 2160p checkerboard, which is a special technique that looks incredibly good on a 4K TV. You’re going to notice a ton of subtle details, from stitching on Aloy’s outfit, individual leafs and branches swaying in the wind, kilometers away in the distance and more detail in all machines and NPCs in the world.
And don’t worry if you’re not going to be playing the game on PS4 Pro, van der Leeuw assures that "the game we demonstrated at the past two E3s was running on standard PS4 hardware. We’re dedicated to making a game that looks great regardless of the model it’s played on; it will look beautiful on PS4, and will look even better on PS4 Pro, particularly if you own an HDR-compatible 4KTV.”
Horizon Zero Dawn is scheduled for release exclusively on PlayStation 4 in the U.S. on February 28 and in the U.K. on March 1, 2017. The game is the first new IP from Guerilla Games since it launched the Killzone franchise back in 2004, and deviates considerably from the science-fiction elements of the popular first-person shooter series.
Instead, Horizon adopts an open-world action-adventure template, with gamers controlling a hunter named Alloy as she battles mechanical creatures to salvage their vital components to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape.