Killzone: Shadow Fall Dev Responds to Nonnative 1080p Report

Earlier this week, Digital Foundry reported that the multiplayer in Killzone: Shadow Fall, Sony and Guerrilla Games’ massive PS4 launch title, doesn’t run natively at 1080p and 60 frames per second. It was one of the first times we had heard about a PS4 game failing to reach this benchmark, but the developer has come out to explain the full situation on the game’s blog.

“In both SP and MP, Killzone: Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60 FPS. Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition,” the post reads. “In multiplayer mode, however, we use a technique called “temporal reprojection,” which combines pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames to reconstruct a full 1080p image. If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native.

“Games often employ different resolutions in different parts of their rendering pipeline. Most games render particles and ambient occlusion at a lower resolution, while some games even do all lighting at a lower resolution. This is generally still called native 1080p. The technique used in Shadow Fall goes further and reconstructs half of the pixels from past frames.”

The question of whether or not a game is pushing the FPS and resolution to where they should be as been a consistent one throughout the start of this new generation, so Guerrilla Games understands that it needs to be clearer in its language moving forward.  

“We recognize the community’s degree of investment on this matter, and that the conventional terminology used before may be too vague to effectively convey what’s going on under the hood,” it continues. “As such we will do our best to be more precise with our language in the future.”