Ubisoft communications manager Gary Steinman has published an article on Ubiblog stating that Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag runs natively at 1080p on PS4. But there’s a catch: it will require a future patch to get there.
Currently, the game runs at 900p on PS4—and presumably the Xbox One. The upcoming patch will not only bump that up to 1080p, but will also bring along with it a new anti-aliasing technique to make the game appear noticeably sharper.
Steinman gave the following explanation for retail copies running at 900p:
But why ship at 900p in the first place? To meet an essential goal: deliver a visually brilliant game at a steady 30 frames per second (the industry gold standard for open-world games). Finishing the game at 900p gave the development team the extra room in terms of the GPU and CPU usage to ensure the framerate never dips below 30 frames per second. The team then used the time between the ship date and the release to focus on a title update that could deliver native 1080p resolution on the PS4.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Activision caught a lot of flak only days ago for announcing something similar for Call of Duty: Ghosts, although that was a day one patch that upgrades the game from 720p to 1080p.
The question many gamers have is whether or not this will common going forward. It appears to stem from developers trying to achieve parity on the Xbox One and PS4 before coming to the realization that the PS4 has plenty of juice left in the tank. Why not take advantage of it?
The PS3 and Xbox 360 had some qraphical discrepancies over the years, but this generation is likely to be at a whole new level. Let’s just hope 1080p patches aren’t commonplace after we exit this launch window.
