‘Quantum Break looks to run on Xbox One in 720p with excellent aa’
According to an analysis by Digital Foundry, it looks quite likely that Quantum Break will be rendered on the Xbox One in 720p resolution. Nevertheless, the engineers are having trouble finalizing this estimate due to things like the “excellent anti-aliasing” in the game.
Digital Foundry, Eurogamer’s division that makes technical analysis of games and gaming hardware, released its fairly comprehensive analysis of the Xbox One version of the game on Saturday. Lighting issues such as ambient occlusion, screen space lighting and global illumination pipelines were already known to be rendered in 720p, but the native resolution of the rest of the game was not yet known. The game’s final output resolution is 1080p, so things like hud elements and menus just have a higher resolution.
“In practically every scene we’ve tested so far, a native resolution of 720p emerges from the pixel count tests. So while individual parts of the game may be rendered at a higher resolution, it now looks like the game’s geometry will be rendered in 720p,” Digital Foundry editor David Bierton wrote.
The Digital Foundry team is having trouble definitively naming the rendering resolution due to the combination of motion blur, film grain, and suspected temporal anti-aliasing, which uses information from previous frames to “smooth” the current frame. Incidentally, in some cleaner, static scenes, the game seems to run in 900p, but this observation is the exception rather than the rule.
Furthermore, Digital Foundry mentions the draw & detail distance for textures and shadows. It is occasionally so low in the name of performance that it distracts from the presentation of the game. The result, based on the first hours of gameplay, is that the game usually runs reliably at 30fps, even with intense action scenes.
Overall, Digital Foundry concludes that while it looks like the game will be rendered in 720p, the implementation of anti-aliasing is so well executed that the need for 1080p resolution is also eliminated. It’s not the first time developer Remedy has gotten away with a lower rendering resolution: Alan Wake’s Xbox 360 version had one as low as 960×540. The image quality then remained good thanks to, among other things, the use of 4xmsaa, according to Digital Foundry.
The game will be released on April 5 for Xbox One and Windows. On the latter platform, according to Remedy, the game will run at a maximum of 30 fps, but the developer says that a lot of work still needs to be done on that version, so that could change. The Windows version of the game will also be exclusive to the Windows Store and Windows 10.