Xbox One’s engineer, Andrew Goossen, commented further on the statement by Microsoft told to OXM that Xbox One is capable of outputting the resolution of up to 4K but the decision is left in the hands of individual developers who may use the resolution as they see fit for their goals. Microsoft also rest assured the people that Xbox One will output all titles to 1080p resolution whether native or upscaled. Goossen said:
We’ve chosen to let title developers make the trade-off of resolution versus per-pixel quality in whatever way is most appropriate to their game content…
A lower resolution generally means that there can be more quality per pixel. With a high quality scaler and anti-aliasing and render resolutions such as 720p or ‘900p’, some games look better with more GPU processing going to each pixel than to the number of pixels; others look better at 1080p with less GPU processing per pixel.
Goossen continued that this approach was different from the initial Xbox 360 approach. “We built Xbox One with a higher quality scaler than on Xbox 360, and added an additional display plane, to provide more freedom to developers in this area.” he added.
This matter of choice was a lesson we learned from Xbox 360 where at launch we had a Technical Certification Requirement mandate that all titles had to be 720p or better with at least 2x anti-aliasing – and we later ended up eliminating that TCR as we found it was ultimately better to allow developers to make the resolution decision themselves….
Game developers are naturally [incentivised] to make the highest quality visuals possible,” he concluded. “And so will choose the most appropriate trade-off between quality of each pixel versus number of pixels for their games.
Ever since an uproar was caused that Ryse: Son of Rome was not native 1080p as opposed to what Aaron Greenberg stated, gamers have been discussing left and right about whether developers hit hardware limitations with Xbox One or not. So far Forza 5 remains the only launch title to remain native 1080p with 60fps.
Stay tuned for more info on this topic.
Thanks, OXM.
