Mark Rubin’s Slip Up: Titanfall Runs at 720p

by

Uh-oh. It looks like Mark Rubin of Infinity Ward has made a pretty big slip up. In an interview with Edge, he admits that Xbox One games are an “upscaled 720p” and makes mention of Titanfall running at 720p:

So you see this being a continuing trend? Will PS4, being the easier console to work with, end up getting the better looking games in this launch window?

I don’t know but overall I do know that other companies have been saying that they’re also 720 on Xbox One – BF4 was 720, Titanfall has already said they’re going to be 720 on Xbox One so it seems to be the dominant direction at the moment, but so much can change.

By the way, it’s also not just us learning the systems better, it’s Microsoft developing more from the systems as well so if it improves the SDKs on their side we could see improvements, or if they could patch their software then all of a sudden we could get a performance boost out of that. It’s a very complex ecosystem.

Titanfall-One-Mini

The comments he made regarding the upscaling of 720p on the Xbox One versus the actual 1080p on the PS4 are a little baffling. 720p is 720p and 1080p is 1080p; there are no effective substitutions. You either are or you aren’t – and the Xbox One isn’t.

Can you personally see the difference between the PS4 and Xbox One versions running side by side?

If they’re running side by side, some people will, some people won’t. The 720 on Xbox One is upscaled to 1080p as far as resolution is concerned – some people have noticed and some people haven’t. I think it’s an individual call. Maybe it’s a close call and maybe it’s not for some people. It really depends on how hyper-aware you are of things like that.

An upscaled 720p is not the same thing as running at a native 1080p. That’s like someone spray painting their chair gold and claiming it to be real gold. No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it’s still a pig. Any other cliches you can think of that apply to faulty polish and claiming it to be better than it really is will be fitting in this case.



Not to mention, another question in the interview asked about the PS4 being more powerful than the Xbox One. While Mark Rubin effectively dodged the question, his answer is still plausible enough to show that he can’t deny the PS4 is more powerful:

A lot of people are taking this as confirmation that Xbox One is the weaker console and PS4 is more powerful. Is it that simple?

It’s a much more complex answer – there’s so much to it, it’s a balancing act when you get into optimisation – we need more time with it all, basically. It could be years from now until we get to the point where we feel like we’ve maxed out what we can do on both platforms.

And it’s not just hardware physically, the amount of resources that each system is allowing the game developers to use isn’t the same. So from our standpoint that’s something that could change, y’know? We might get more resources back at one point. And that could make things change dramatically for the Xbox One, for instance. It’s a long complicated road that will take years to develop, and I think at the end we’ll have games looking very similar, usually, on both systems.

“It could be years from now until we get to the point where we feel like we’ve maxed out what we can do on both platforms” can translate to “Give us time to make your $500 worth it. We promise it’ll come eventually.” If you try to boast superiority between consoles, you need to give your consumers more of a hope that their investment will pay off sooner rather than later.

Also, CEO and Producer of Reach Games, Adrian Vergara confirmed the 720p comments above in a conversation on Twitter: