The Playstation 4’s ‘The Order 1866’ has had yet more news released regarding the resolution, and it’s actually pretty damn positive. The title has been confirmed to be currently using the rather costly (but very accurate) MSAA x4 by the games developers.
Via Twitter Andrea Pessnio said “not set in stone yet, but we do run 4xMSAA which looks spectacular! x800 with AA looks MUCH better than x1080 without :),” he then further clarified the statement “to be clear, x800 with 4xMSAA needs more bandwidth than x1080 would, so 1080 no MS would be cheaper”.
This explains the developers decision to use the large borders at the top and bottom of the screen, thus forcing the resolution to 1920×800 instead of the more traditional 1920x1080P. Clearly the game is going to benefit with extra GPU time and memory bandwidth from not needing to render the extra pixels and thus developers can instead use MSAA x4. The Order 1886 is also running at 30FPS, instead of 60.
On consoles, traditionally the titles use the far cheaper FXAA, which in terms of a performance hit is far kinder on the games performance. The downside is that it’s far less accurate, and can result in shimmering or blurry edges. The purpose of Anti-Aliasing is to remove the ‘jaggies’ which are present on lines / objects and to smooth them out. MSAA (Multi-Sampling Anti Aliasing) is a far more expensive and yet more accurate method that console developers tend to avoid due to it draining so much of the systems resources.
A vocal portion of the gaming public aren’t happy with Ready At Dawn’s resolution and Anti Aliasing solution, and would rather have no black bars (in other words, true 1080P and settle for a lower form of Anti-Aliasing.
It’d be ‘nice’ if the developers included an option for those who the black borders bother. Obviously, this would be to the sacrifice of the high levels of Anti-Aliasing and likely force the use of FXAA or similar.
The Order 1886 is going to be a visual treat for PS4 owners, with the developers already confirming clouds of dust and particles will be animated, subtly dropping on to the camera, the games world (all objects apparently) are using soft body physics and objects can be bent and destroy. One example that’s been given is magnetic forces can bend / break metal bars, which is extremely impressive.
It’s worth remembering that we’re not going to be seeing a ‘stretched’ image, so the Order 1886 will still have a 1:1 mapping of pixels. It’ll help provide a very clean and crisp image, which is clearly the direction the games developers want to go with the game.