Games publisher Activision announced today that Call of Duty: Ghosts will receive an update tomorrow which would enable the PlayStation 4 to run the game natively at 1080p (Full HD) instead of at 720p (HD) — fixing the controversial resolution issue that has left a sour taste in gamers’ mouths in the past two weeks.
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An Activision spokesperson told Eurogamer:
“Call of Duty: Ghosts runs natively at 1080p on the PlayStation 4. There was a configuration issue in the retail version on single-player mode only. This has been addressed with a day one software update. People will be able to download the day one update when PlayStation 4 launches in their territory and play at native 1080p.”
Now for some context. Last week, news came out about Call of Duty: Ghosts running at 720p on the Xbox One while running 1080p on the PlayStation 4. Soon after, Mark Rubin, executive producer at developing company Infinity Ward told the media that the raison d’être simply has to do with “memory allocation”. If they’d boosted the resolution to 1080p there would have been a number of issues from random crashes to lagging gameplay.
While every gamer though this is an obvious score for the PS4, CoD: Ghosts‘ gameplay on Sony’s latest console suggested otherwise. There were numerous reports of Ghosts‘ frame rate dropping causing a stutter-effect or a slight lag on 1080p.
A review of CoD: Ghosts on the Xbox One by Polygon reads the following:
“Call of Duty: Ghosts suffers from consistent frame rate drops on the PS4, especially during multiplayer when action got especially hectic. The Xbox One version suffered no such drops, maintaining a steady 60 frames per second throughout.”
Without this patch for the PS4, the game is running multiplayer mode at 1080p with singleplayer being 720p. Whether this patch will fix the FPS (frames per second) issue on the PS4, we don’t know but it would only make sense if it does.
It was suggested that while this might be a considerable upset for both the PS4 and Infinity Ward, the fact that both were reviewed before their official launch dates meant that there were time to fix the problem. As such, the is a patch being released on the day of the games’ official launch date. Here! Here!
While this issue might seem petty, it could determine the tipping point for gamers having to decide between buying Microsoft’s Xbox One or Sony’s PlayStation 4. More importantly, the performance of a record-breaking title such as Call of Duty gives us an indication of how future titles’ limits might be determined by which console you’re using.
A video published by The Sixth Axis shows the difference between both consoles’ visuals:
