Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag on PS4 will be given an update to ensure that the game will run at 1080p.
The game will initially run at 900p when shipped, but Ubisoft community manager Gary Steinman confirmed on the Ubisoft Blog than an there will be an update “shortly after release” that will upgrade the game to 1080p.
In the post, Steinman explained the reason behind shipping the game at 900p was to ensure the game never dropped below 30 frames per second (fps). He said: “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.” He added: “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.”
Associate Producer Sylvain Trottier feels that some players may not even notice a difference even with the update, as the game already looks great. He said: “If it’s running at 720p vs 1080p, you’re going to notice the difference, by far,” Adding: “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.”
Trottier also said that whilst running a game at 1080 is impressive, that is not the most important part of the update, and noted that their new anti-aliasing technology included in the update is the more significant aspect of the update.
He said: “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.”
Gary Steinman concluded by promising: “Along with the full 1080p native resolution, the visuals have been improved even further, simply because the engineers knew that with the additional time they could do even more. So they did. And now, not only will you see every single miniscule pixel in glorious 1080p native resolution on the PS4 – exactly as the artists rendered it – but you’ll also see an even cleaner, clearer and more brilliant moving image than anyone even imagined.”
The anti-aliasing technique will also feature on the Xbox One.
[Source: Ubisoft Blog]
