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Infinity Ward had the Xbox One version of Call of Duty: Ghosts running in 1080p, but was forced to lower the resolution to 720p because it couldn’t hit its 60 frames per second target, executive producer Mark Rubin has told Eurogamer.
“Early on, we didn’t know where exactly the resolution of anything would fall because we didn’t have hardware or the software to support it,” Rubin explained. “We tried to focus in on 1080p, and if we felt like we were on borderline of performance somewhere… We tried to make the best decision for each platform that gives you the best-looking game we could get and maintains that 60 frames a second.
“There’s no specific, oh, well, the VO chat on Xbox took up so much resources that we couldn’t do 1080p native. There’s no definitive one to one per se cause and effect. It’s just an overall thing. We took each system individually and said, ‘okay, let’s make the best game for each system.’
“I think both look great. Some people might notice if they had them right next to each other. Some people might not. The Xbox One is 1080p output, it’s just upscaled hardware wise.”
Rubin said the call to abandon 1080p in favour of 720p only came “a month ago”.
Of course, things may change with future Call of Duty releases, says Rubin.
“It’s very possible we can get it to native 1080p. I mean I’ve seen it working at 1080p native. It’s just we couldn’t get the frame rate in the neighbourhood we wanted it to be,” he explained.
“And it wasn’t a lack of effort. It wasn’t that it was like last minute. We had the theoretical hardware for a long time. That’s the thing you get pretty quickly and that doesn’t change dramatically. It was more about resource allocation. The resource allocation is different on the consoles. That huge web of tangled resources, whether it’s threads-based or if it’s GPU threads or if it’s memory – whatever it is – optimisation is something that could go theoretically on forever.”
Rubin concluded that the “first time at bat at a new console is a challenging one. That’s just the way it is. For people fearful one system is more powerful than the other or vice versa, it’s a long game”.
Call of Duty: Ghosts launches at midnight tonight.
Source: Eurogamer
