In case you missed it, Digital Foundry posted their report on Killzone: Shadow Fall’s multiplayer earlier this week. In it, they detailed how the single player runs at 1080p, but the multiplayer runs at 960×1080, “utilizing an innovative upscaling technique using previously calculated visual data.”
Today, Killzone: Shadow Fall Producer Poria Torkan addressed Digital Foundry’s report, saying, “Killzone: Shadow Fall’s single and multiplayer modes both run at 1080p.” When answering a question about that being native, Torkan added, “In both SP and MP, Killzone: Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60fps. Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition.”
Torkan continued:
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 Killzone: Shadow Fall goes further and reconstructs half of the pixels from past frames.
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. As such we will do our best to be more precise with our language in the future.
Torkan also explained how “the temporal reprojection technique gave subjectively similar results and it makes certain parts of the rendering process faster. This reduces controller lag and increases responsiveness, which improves the Killzone: Shadow Fall multiplayer experience.”
Over on Twitter, Game Director Steven ter Heide responded to someone who asked if this technique could make it possible to put the single player at a stable 60fps (you can lock it at 30fps):
This part of the pipeline only affects the rendering. Not the AI, level layout, and all the other things going on in single player.
Still want to know more? Guerrilla Games will be discussing Killzone: Shadow Fall’s rendering techniques at GDC on March 20th in Room 132, North Hall, where they will “go into much more detail.”
Did Guerrilla Games clear everything up for you? Let us know in the comments below.
[Via]
