While the Xbox One and Playstation 4’s resolution has received much attention in both gaming news and from gamer’s themselves, and not much of that attention has been particularly good. Sony have just been hit with a lawsuit because of the whole Temporal Reprojection situation, and Microsoft routinely smacked upside the head for each cross platform announcement that has the X1 running at ‘only’ 720P.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity might well be running at only 720P on Sony’s Playstation 4 however, according to Sony’s official website. The Sony Entertainment Network lists both the requirements (such as number of controllers and install size) along with the resolution of games. If we take a look at Assassin’s Creed Unity’s resolution, you’ll notice that it does indeed state 720P;
Other games such as Infamous Second Son, Resogun and Diablo 3 meanwhile lists 1080P for their respective output resolution.
Currently, there aren’t any PC requirements released so we can’t take a look at those and decide if the game is substantially more taxing than say AC Black Flag. Ubisoft have stated in several interviews they are targeting 1080P – but obviously targeting isn’t the same thing as achieving. It’s important to remember that since this is a next generation only title, Unity doesn’t have the old generation consoles acting like a nose around its neck.
During our Assassin’s Creed Black Flag PS4 vs PC analysis we can clearly see the PC version does look better (especially when / if you factor in the frame rate), and the Physx patch for PC helped further still. Judging purely by trailers, gameplay and statements from Ubisoft, Unity will be considerably more demanding than Black Flag pm the hardware – and this could be the reason for the reduced resolution of the game to only 720p. Remember, the GPU has to work around twice as hard to output 1080P natively as it does 720P.
Another possibility is that the resolution hasn’t been selected yet, and Sony are putting this down as a “safe” minimal resolution they feel the game could run at. In other words, they don’t want to be sued again by false advertising and figure the better option is to put a lower resolution then raise it when there’s confirmation. It’s also possible that we’ll be seeing a day one patch, which is just what happened with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag on the PS4. Without the patch, the title would run at only 900P and without Anti-Aliasing.
1 player
Network Players 2-4
50GB minimum save size
DUALSHOCK®4
Remote Play
720p HD Video Output
The above wording is from Sony’s own website, but there’s no mention (currently) for Microsoft and so we can only guess as to the resolution the Xbox One version will end up with.