PS4 game Killzone: Shadow Fall dev responds to 1080p controversy

Killzone: Shadow Fall developer Guerrilla Games has responded to debate over the game's native resolution and frame-rate, confirming in a blog post today that the game does in fact run natively in 1080p at 60fps for both single- and multiplayer.

The blog post comes, ostensibly, in reaction to a Eurogamer report that found that the Killzone: Shadow Fall multiplayer mode opted for a 960x1080 framebuffer as a means to achieve 60fps. Some fans were miffed by this report, saying Guerrilla Games and Sony hoodwinked them.

Guerrilla Games explained today that it uses a technique called "temporal reprojection" to combine pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames as a means to reconstruct a full 1080p image.

"If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native," producer Poria Torkan said. "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."

Torkan said Guerrilla Games is aware of the community's "degree of investment" on this matter and that the conventional terminology may be "too vague" to effectively explain what's actually happening under the hood. He said Guerrilla Games will "do our best" to be more precise with its use of language in the future when addressing its development techniques.

If you're interested in the technical minutiae of the technology and techniques behind Killzone: Shadow Fall, be sure to read Torkan's full blog post. Guerrilla Games will also discuss the game's rendering techniques--including temporal reprojection--during the Game Developers Conference later this month. GameSpot will be in attendance at the show.

For more on Killzone: Shadow Fall, check out GameSpot's review.