Today, Guerrilla Games Technical Director Michiel van der Leeuw went in-depth on how the PlayStation 4 Pro will benefit Horizon Zero Dawn when it launches next year on February 28, 2017.
To start, van der Leeuw explained that Horizon Zero Dawn was running on a standard PS4 during the past two E3s and the final release will “look beautiful on PS4,” but it “will look even better on PS4 Pro — particularly if you own an HDR-compatible 4K TV.”
Thanks to the PS4 Pro’s extra power, Guerrilla is able to “get even closer to our vision for a lush and vibrant living world,” and they can “do some exciting things for Horizon Zero Dawn’s art style.”
If you own a standard 1080p HDTV, van der Leeuw talked about what to expect from Horizon running on a PS4 Pro:
For starters, for players who still possess standard 1080p HDTVs, we’re able to offer far better image quality. We’ve got a number of techniques at our disposal. The most logical one is supersampling. This is a very high-quality anti-aliasing technique, which basically means we internally render at a higher resolution (close to 4K) before shrinking it down to the final 1080p resolution. As our internal calculations are done at a resolution much higher than 1080p, more detail survives before we shrink it down to 1080p, resulting in smoother edges — virtually no jaggies — and a more stable image.
Guerrilla’s also looking at “enhancing the quality of our shadow maps and increasing the quality of our anisotropic filtering” on a 1080p TV, but they still have some tweaking to do before it becomes a reality.
If you own a 4K TV, Horizon Zero Dawn will use checkerboard rendering to run at 2160p:
[…] Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 Pro will fully support users with 4K TVs, outputting at a much higher resolution. We’re rendering 2160p checkerboard, which is a special technique that looks incredible on a 4K TV. You’re going to notice a ton of subtle details, from stitching on Aloy’s outfit, individual leaves and branches swaying in the wind, kilometers away in the distance, and more detail in all the machines and NPCs in the world.
Finally, if you have an HDR-enabled (high dynamic range) TV, you’ll be “looking at the image in its full glory, with brighter and deeper colors, more contrast and vibrancy, in its pristine state.”
van der Leeuw concluded by saying his favorite thing about PS4 Pro “is that it provides a lot of extra processing power.”
[Source: PS Blog]
