First things first: Killzone Shadow Fall looks absolutely amazing on the PlayStation 4. There isn’t much room for debate — you can check out some gorgeous Killzone Shadow Fall panoramic screenshots here, or read our in-depth Killzone Shadow Fall review here. But there is plenty of debate, senseless though it may or may not be, surrounding whether or not the new game is actually displayed at true native 1080p resolution.
Sony was recently shamed for “lying” to gamers in its marketing for the popular title, and now the title’s developer has issued a public response to the controversy.
Despite many claims to the contrary, Killzone Shadow Fall developer Guerrilla Games confirmed in a blog post late last week that the title does, in fact, run natively in full HD 1080p at 60 frames per second in both single player and multiplayer mode.
“Killzone Shadow Fall’s single and multiplayer modes both run at 1080p,” Guerrilla Games wrote in a question and answer style post. “In both SP and MP, Killzone Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60 FPS. Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition. In Multiplayer mode, however, we use a technique called ‘temporal reprojection,’ which 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.”
The post continued, “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. We recognize 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.”
Check out Guerrilla Games’ full post, which is linked below in our source section, for more on the matter.
