The big difference between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 during these early first generation titles for the eighth generation home consoles is that many of the games are running native 1080p on the PlayStation 4. A lot of media have noted that the differences between 720p and native 1080p aren't widely noticeable, however those comparisons in which those distinctions were made and turned out to be skewed.
Well, Ubisoft clears the air of many misconceptions relating to the resolution discrepancies that have caused many gaming media to completely dismiss the resolution differences between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, stating that there is a difference between 720p and 1080p “by far”.
Content on sharing the news via a blog and not with a gaming site (ohh, major burn to some lucky site who missed out on the ad revenue for this exclusive) Ubisoft had the following to share regarding the topic of resolution for Assassin's Creed IV on the PlayStation 4. Ubisoft's associate producer Sylvain Trottier mentioned that the reason some benchmarks might reveal a lack of discrepancy between different console versions of Assassin's Creed IV is because the game has to be patched to 1080p...
“If it’s running at 720p vs 1080p, you’re going to notice the difference, by far,” ...“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,” … “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.”
So basically, they had to do a rush job and get Black Flag out for the PS4 at a lower resolution to hit the 30fps mark due to a lack of optimization. The game will ship to retail at 900p native for the PS4 and will be patched with a title update to native 1080p, improved hardware specific anti-aliasing and locked 30fps – and hopefully that actually means “locked” and not a wobbly mess of Jello-esque frame rates like Dead Rising 3 and its “locked” 30fps that averages out to 20fps.
In addition to cleaning up the images with AA and higher resolution, there will also be improved image resolution for objects and textures.
Now, according to the Ubisoft post, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag's AA technique won't be a proprietary PS4 function, it will be a shared function across both Microsoft and Sony's systems. However, Ubisoft did not clarify if that means the Xbox One will be patched up to native 1080p like its PS4 counterpart. The likely answer is “No” unless they say otherwise.
Infinity Ward already got caught with their pants down like Anthony Weiner at a bachelorette party, when the validity of benchmarks have been called into question and many are now labeled as invalid after it was revealed that Call of Duty: Ghosts on the PS4 this entire time has been running native 720p just like the Xbox One version of the game. It's good that Ubisoft came clean early about this issue before the official benchmarks from pixel-counters have been submitted for public perusal.
