The Playstation 4 version of Assassin’s Creed 4 has been confirmed to run in native 1080P with Anti-Aliasing assuming you download a patch. This patch will be available to download shortly after the games release, otherwise the PS4 version of AC4 Black Flag will run at 900P.
This info has been confirmed at a recent blog from Ubisoft by Associate Producer Sylvain Trottier.
“If it’s running at 720p vs 1080p, you’re going to notice the difference, by far,” Trottier explains. “But if it’s set at a resolution that’s very close, where most of the pixels are already there in internal processing, most people won’t see any difference.”
“The most important part of this title update is not necessarily 1080p native resolution,” Trottier smiles. “It’s the fact that even when we were done with the project, even when we were finished with the certification and everything else, even when most of the engineers had started to work on other projects – like we always do at Ubisoft – some of my engineers continued to work on Black Flag and they even developed a brand-new anti-aliasing technique.”
He also promises that the new Anti-Aliasing technique will function not just on the Playstation 4 version of AC4, but also on Microsoft’s Xbox One console too.
So in case you’re curious as to why this wasn’t done for the retail disc, and has been ‘patched in’ for the PS4 version, it’s pretty simple.
http://youtu.be/lhi9LqwHfdA
When the game was being developed, the designers had to ensure that the title ran at a smooth 30 frames per second (FPS). But due to the tight time constraints of producing the title for launch, the developers couldn’t optimize the game as much as they wanted. This meant that they aimed for 900P for the PS4 version of AC4, which reduces the load on not only the CPU but more importantly, the GPU. 1920×1080 (1080P) is just over 2 million pixels, vs 1.44 million pixels of 1600×900 (900P).
This post launch patch has seen the team add in a bunch of optimizations which have improved the frame rate of the game at a higher resolution. It’s pretty awesome that the team at Ubisoft have found a new AA (Anti-Aliasing) technique too. I’m most curious to find out more about it in the coming weeks.
So if you want to enjoy AC4 Black Flag in full 1080P on your brand spanking new PS4, then you might be better to wait until the patch is made available.
