It's that time of year again! The smell of gun powder and Doritos is in the air, and that can mean only one thing: Call of Duty. After the disappointing next-gen debut of Call of Duty: Ghosts last year, all eyes are on Sledgehammer Games to see if the franchise will return to form. Based on early analysis, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is exactly what fans have been waiting for, but there are some notable technical compromises on the Xbox One and PS4.
Earlier this week, Michael Condrey from Sledgehammer Games confirmed that the Xbox One version of the game is running at 1360 x 1080(Opens in a new window), and will scale dynamically to 1920 x 1080 in less busy areas of the game. Does that sound weird to you? It certainly should.
The vast majority of HDTVs have an aspect ratio of 16:9, but a 1360 x 1080 image is in the oddball 34:27 aspect ratio. So, what gives? Well, it seems that the game is rendering a horizontally squished image natively at 1360 x 1080, and then being stretched to 1920 x 1080 to correct the image. As you can see in the animation embedded above, this trick is very reminiscent of the anamorphic(Opens in a new window) techniques used for some widescreen movies.
Stretching and scaling quirks aside, this is good news for Xbox One owners. Call of Duty: Ghosts maxed out at 1280 x 720 (921,600 pixels) on the Xbox One, so the upgrade to a minimum of 1360 x 1080 (1,468,800 pixels) is a big improvement. That's a 1.59x increase in the number of pixels being output. The more visual fidelity, the better.
Image credit: Eurogamer(Opens in a new window)
The resolution difference between the Xbox One and PS4 is noticeable, but it's a relatively minor ding overall. According to the Digital Foundry analysis, the Xbox One version of the game might actually be preferable due to the performance issues with the PS4 version(Opens in a new window). What's the price for native 1920 x 1080 rendering? Apparently, it's the frame rate.
During busy action scenes, the PS4 version of Advanced Warfare frequently dips into the 50s. By comparison, the Xbox One version stays pegged at 60 nearly the entire time. This might be possible to fix with a patch, but as it stands, the PS4 version has a little bit of a stuttering problem. It's just a shame that we're nearly a full year into this console generation, and 1080p60 is still a rarity among major AAA games.
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