Killzone: Shadow Fall’s graphics land Sony in court

A Californian man is suing Sony over allegations that the company mislead the public over Killzone: Shadow Fall’s graphics.

Polygon reports that Douglas Ladore is annoyed and/or senses a possible money-making opportunity over the fact that while advertised as running in 1080p, when in multiplayer the game actually outputs at a native 960×1080 resolution that is then upscaled to 1080p.

Says the lawsuit: "Unfortunately, Sony’s marketing and on-box representations turned out to be nothing more than fiction.” It has been filed by the same company behind the Gearbox and Sega Aliens: Colonial Marines lawsuit.

So, the game does output in 1080p, but using an upscaling tech. So is that really 1080p? Yes, but technically it’s not native 1080p” – that being where a pure 1080p resolution is rendered and output. This is where the whole thing becomes a semantic debate.

In both SP and MP, Killzone: Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60fps,” producer Poria Torkan said of the issue back in March.

In Multiplayer mode, however, we use a technique called ‘temporal reprojection’ which combines pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames to reconstruct a full 1080p image. If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native.

Games often employ different resolutions in different parts of their rendering pipeline. Most games render particles and ambient occlusion at a lower resolution, while some games even do all lighting at a lower resolution. This is generally still called native 1080p. The technique used in KSF goes further and reconstructs half of the pixels from past frames.

On occasion the prediction fails and locally pixels become blurry, or thin vertical lines appear. However, most of the time the prediction works well and the image is identical to a normal 1080p image. We then increase sub-pixel anti-aliasing using our 1080p ‘previous frame’ and motion vectors, further improving the image quality.

We recognize the community’s degree of investment on this matter, and that the conventional terminology used before may be too vague to effectively convey what’s going on under the hood. As such we will do our best to be more precise with our language in the future.”