There have been rumours speculating that Sony’s God of War 3 will be a native 1080p release, which is obviously extremely exciting news for those owning full HD displays. Well, initial indications, based on Sony’s own newly released trailer, say otherwise. There are two videos available now for download on the PlayStation Store - 1080p and 720p - but it’s clear that the full HD video is nothing more than an upscaled version of the superb 720p trailer, and plays back with a tangible quality hit.
1080p has more than double the pixel count of 720p, but the filesize of the former is only about 1.5 times larger than the latter. There’s actually no point whatsoever in downloading the 1080p version as it contains more compression artifacts than the 720p version on which it is based, and takes longer to download! Indeed, it seems that the 720p trailer actually resolves more detail than the 1080p version.
The proof of the pudding is right here in the form of these screenshots taken directly from Sony’s trailer.
Kratos is back! And while the trailer itself looks excellent, pixel measurements prove that both 720p and 1080p videos are based on the same lower resolution source. If the video was native 1080p we would’ve expected to see the 720p version downscaled from the full HD original, but that’s clearly not the case here. Here we have the same frame from the 720p and 1080p versions of the trailer, along with upscaled and downscaled versions of the same image using the bicubic Photoshop resizing filter. The images suggest that downloading the 720p version and letting your display upscale to 1080p would provide a better picture.In short, we’re confused. Sony doesn’t tend to provide 1080p promo videos of 720p games as a rule (though if memory serves some 1080p Killzone 2 vids were out and about) so what is the company trying to achieve with this effort? Is it trying to tell us that God of War 3 will be 1080p, but it isn’t quite yet? Or are they telling us in advance that it’ll be upscaled from 720p, in which case why bother pumping out a 1080p vid?
On the plus side, a confirmed 720p resolution with 2xMSAA is absolutely fine with us, particularly when the assets look as good as this.