Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the games used to demonstrate the PS4 Pro, and now developer Guerilla Games has highlighted some of the enhancements users of 1080p and 4K TVs will benefit from when playing on the new PlayStation 4 console.

Both 1080p and 4K versions will get extra detail in the natural environment as shown in the PS4 Pro reveal event, as well as HDR.

“We normally have to do a lot of work in the engine to take an internal high dynamic range image and then make it suitable to be displayed on a normal,” explains  explains Michiel van der Leeuw, Technical Director, Guerilla Games. “A lot of colour fidelity gets lost in the process. If you own an HDR-enabled TV, we don’t have to lose that data and you’re looking at the image in its full glory, with brighter and deeper colours, more contrast and vibrancy, in its pristine state. The benefits are truly awesome.”

1080p Users

“We’re able to offer far better image quality,” says van der Leeuw. “We’ve got a number of techniques at our disposal. The most logical one is supersampling. This is a very high-quality anti-aliasing technique, which basically means we internally render at a higher resolution (close to 4K) before shrinking it down to the final 1080p resolution.

“As our internal calculations are done at a resolution much higher than 1080p, more detail survives before we shrink it down to 1080p, resulting in smoother edges – virtually no jaggies – and a more stable image.

“We’re also looking at enhancing the quality of our shadow maps and increasing the quality of our anisotropic filtering. This is a technique which increases the quality of texture sampling, resulting in more detailed environment textures. We still have to tweak these elements of the 1080p output quality for the final game, but we have quite a bit of power yet to play with.”

4K Users

“Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 Pro will fully support users with 4KTVs, outputting at a much higher resolution,” says van der Leeuw. “We’re rendering 2160p checkerboard, which is a special technique that looks incredibly good on a 4K TV. You’re going to notice a ton of subtle details, from stitching on Aloy’s outfit, individual leafs and branches swaying in the wind, kilometers away in the distance and more detail in all machines and NPCs in the world.

And don’t worry if you’re not going to be playing the game on PS4 Pro, van der Leeuw assures that “the game we demonstrated at the past two E3s was running on standard PS4 hardware. We’re dedicated to making a game that looks great regardless of the model it’s played on; it will look beautiful on PS4, and will look even better on PS4 Pro, particularly if you own an HDR-compatible 4KTV”.

Source: EU PS Blog