Hoping that the resolution wars will show improvement over the ages when it comes to the disparity between the PS4 and Xbox One, will have to hope a little longer because Battlefield Hardline only brings back the distance that the PS4 and Xbox One shared at the start of the generation.
In a tweet by the official Visceral Games Twitter account, one user asked about the resolution for Hardline and what the specs would be on Microsoft and Sony's systems. According to the Twitter account...
The responses were not pleasant. In fact, most people responded with a bunch of textual laughter and the whole “Next-gen is a joke”.
One user had a very funny reply, stating...
It's a good point, even if you want to ignore it.
On PC the game will run 1080p at 60fps in a breeze. You'll get it for the same price (or sometimes slightly cheaper) than the console counterparts and you won't have to pay to play online. The drawback? Well, you'll need an Origin account.
The most interesting thing about it is that Visceral Games – even with an extra few years of time with the hardware over DICE – still couldn't manage to pull Battlefield Hardline above 900p on the PS4 and above 720p on the Xbox One. It's a sad state of affairs given that Battlefield 4 was a launch title for the systems back in 2013 and had the same 900p resolution on PS4 and 720p resolution on the Xbox One with a variable 60 frames per second.
It was mentioned many times in the past that the Xbox One and PS4 hitting 1080p at 60fps was going to be a rarity, but with some fairly high-end games it looks like it's going to become a special treat if either console scales above 900p.
To the benefit of the PS4 and its higher-end GPU with the extra compute cores, along with a better setup between the shared GGDR5 memory, we're seeing the PS4 mostly hover between 1080p and 900p consistently, usually tapping the former more than the latter. For the Xbox One, the system's limited 32MB of eSRAM has caused developers quite the trouble, forcing a lot of developers to scale back the resolution or the frame-rate in order to get the game running right proper in a playable manner.
I was a little shocked that Battlefield Hardline was only 900p and 720p respectively because it didn't seem to be as graphically intense as Battlefield 4. Then again, the scale-back could have been in response to stabilizing 60fps instead of a variable frame-rate, as well as making sure the multiplayer stayed as smooth as possible.
You can look for Battlefield Hardline to launch on the seventh-gen and eighth-gen consoles as well as PC on March 17th, later this month. For more info feel free to visit the official website.
