Microsoft and Sony have finally announced their new, more powerful console revisions. The PS4 Pro and Project Scorpio promise a significant performance bump over their current-gen counterparts, supposedly ushering in the era of 4K console gaming. But although we will see some 4K games, it's likely that neither console has the power to pull off the higher resolution without compromise.
We've heard this story before. When the Xbox 360 was unveiled at E3 in 2005, it was supposed to play games at a crisp 720p or 1080i. The following year, when Sony announced the PlayStation 3, it did so by showing off Gran Turismo HD running at a native 1080i/60, with the promise of 1080p games to come.
For the most part, that didn't happen. Instead, many Xbox 360 games upscaled just to hit 720p. The significantly more powerful PS3 also stuck mostly to 720p, with a smattering of 1,280 x 1,080 games (that were then processed to stretch out the horizontal resolution). To my memory, the only 1080p game I had on PlayStation 3 was Fifa Street 3 (I make bad life choices). Oh, and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue let me see my garage (and only my garage) in 1080p.
Then came the current console generation and the pitch of true 1080p gaming. Very quickly, that promise unraveled. Xbox One launch titles like Ryse (900p) and Dead Rising 3 (720p) that fell short, with only Forza Motorsport 5 hitting 1080p at the expense of anti-aliasing and texture quality. PlayStation 4 titles fared a little better: Infamous: Second Son, Killzone: Shadow Fall and Knack hit 1080p. But all three games suffered from serious frame rate issues: Killzone developer Guerrilla Games was forced to add a 30fps lock to the single player through an update and faced a (failed) lawsuit when it was discovered the "1080p 60fps" multiplayer actually ran at 960 x 1,080 and pixel doubled using "temporal reprojection."
The biggest cross-platform title of the launch window, Ubisoft's Watch Dogs, hit 792p on Xbox One and 900p on PlayStation 4. Both versions relied on adaptive v-sync (a trick that minimizes stuttering when frames aren't rendered in time) just to stick to 30fps.
Things have improved a little since then, as developers now understand the consoles' respective limitations. We now see some 1080p games that mostly stick to 30fps, with exclusive titles Rise of the Tomb Raider on Xbox One and Bloodborne on PlayStation 4 being prime examples. Even so, the vast majority of titles struggle, with shooters relying on dynamic scaling to hit 60fps and other games sticking with 30fps caps just to get by. There are outliers, of course: Lots of last-gen remasters are hitting the holy grail of 1080p and 60fps (1080p60). And some games -- like Forza Motorsport 6 on the Xbox One and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on the PS4 -- run almost entirely at 1080p60.
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