One of the big marketing catchphrases for the Xbox One X is for the notion of ‘True 4K’, emphasising a native 2160p resolution without having to resort to techniques like checkerboarding as on PlayStation 4 Pro. It’s a nice idea, but while Microsoft will naturally be able to push this internally, third parties don’t seem to be having quite as much luck of matching this with a high, consistent frame rate.
For example, Project Cars 2 was announced as not being native 4K, and now there’s Killing Floor 2, which is coming to Xbox One in August and will have Xbox One X support for when that console releases. The game will run at 1800p instead of 2160p, albeit with the higher quality textures, shadow maps and shadow draw distance. By comparison, the PlayStation 4 Pro runs the  game at 1800p checkerboard, which means that the Xbox One X is at a higher native resolution.
Tripwire’s Senior Graphics Programmer Dave Elder explained:
Xbox One X was a very smooth and easy platform to develop for. It took very little engineering effort to get our base Xbox One game running on the Xbox One X. It took maybe 4 hours of programming effort total.
Killing Floor 2 runs at native 1800p, fixed resolution (no checkerboarding) on Xbox One X. Â We did experiment with true 4k rendering, but the frame rate drop was a bit too significant. 1800p provides the optimal balance between visual quality and performance in Killing Floor 2.
We don’t have a specific frame rate target for Xbox One X, although the game does run at higher frame rates than the base Xbox One, even at 1800p resolution. We will be using Ultra textures on Xbox One X.  We are also increasing the resolution of our shadow maps and shadow draw distance.
As announced last week, the Killing Floor 2 is out for Xbox One on 29th August, with a platform exclusive Freezethrower weapon and Wasteland Armor uniform.
Source: wccftech
Starman
So “It’s not 4k” is the new “It’s not 1080p” isn’t it?
MrYd
Not quite “true 4K” isn’t really the issue though, is it? Nobody’s going to notice the difference between “true 4K” and 1800p, unlike the difference between 900p and 1080p.
The real issue is MS making a big deal out of the OneX doing “true 4K” when that’s not going to be the case for most things because (a) the hardware obviously isn’t quite up to the job, and (b) nobody’s going to be spending too much time and effort optimising anything for a tiny fraction of users on a platform that’s already so far behind.
Games might get a few upgrades that don’t cost developers anything in time or money, like a more stable framerate (maybe a near enough constant 60fps while the PS4Pro has a few drops to the low 50s you might notice if you spend too much time analysing the performance). Or the resolution might stay a bit higher, not that anyone would notice.
ron_mcphatty
Little White Lie 4K?
Starman
Nobody will notice the difference between 1800 and 4k? Even for you that’s a phenomenally ridiculous claim. I know you must attack Microsoft at all costs but that is just stupid.
MrYd
I know you feel the need to defend MS at all costs, but do you want to defend your claim that you can tell the difference between 1800 and 4K?
1800 to 4K is the same difference as 900 to 1080 (about 30% less pixels). But add all the clever upscaling techniques and nobody is going to be able to tell the difference unless they’ve got 2 massive TVs side by side and sat at the sort of distance that makes seeing the whole screen at once (which is kind of important) difficult. And even then you’d need to pause the game and inspect things closely. At which point, either the Pro or 1X could presumably do some sort of dynamic resolution thing and easily hit proper native 4K.
It doesn’t really matter, because actual 4K is mostly not an option for either platform anyway. Some first party MS games might manage it by making other sacrifices, purely as a marketing thing that nobody would be stupid enough to fall for, surely?
Starman
What a predictable reply. If nobody can notice the difference then why do bother? Remember Sony made this generation about power, Microsoft have simply followed suit with a more powerful console.
TSBonyman
I’m not hugely surprised about a free-to-play game not chasing for 4K but i’m impressed at the time they were able to get it ready for XB1x in – 4 hours? That’s a marvel.
MrYd
I’d say 4 hours is probably about the most time anyone would want to spend on making things a bit nicer for a tiny handful of users. A sort of “Friday afternoon, don’t want to start anything big, can quickly knock out a 1X version and go home early” type of job.
Tuffcub
Can we borrow your crystal ball please? You seem to know the sales figures of XB1X months before it has been released.
TSBonyman
Yep, free-to-play. At the same time i have to wonder how much better they could have done if they actually spent time optimising it. :)
MrYd
Are you saying the 1X is going to sell huge numbers then?
It’s not, is it? It’s going to be like the PS4 Pro and sell a fraction of what the cheaper version sells. If 20% of PS4s being sold are Pros, it’s unlikely the 1X is going to do better.
So if we’re about halfway through this generation, and the second half had just as many sales…
That’s another 20m XBones, and 4m of those could be 1Xs. Out of a combined total of 160m XBones/PS4s.
So 2.5%? Definite “knock something up on a Friday afternoon and go home early” territory there.
Of course, the 1X could be stupidly successful. If it sells 4 times as much as would be expected from what’s happened so far this generation, it could get as high as 10%. Might be worth spending a whole day adding 1X support.
So I don’t have crystal balls, I’m just basing it on the past few years and even allowing for something surprising to happen. Surely nobody thinks MS could catch up with Sony this generation? It’s not a PS3 situation were Sony messed up and were behind but by the end it was pretty much a draw (or a slight win for Sony)
Tuffcub
There are less X1 owners to upgrade to X1X, it’s going to be less of the situation with Pro where people already own a PS4. Xbox owners who swapped to PS4 this gen may get tempted back by the X1X.
That said, the price is going to put a lot of people off.
Even so, writing something off before it’s even launched is a bit odd :)
Pixel_nme
Killing Floor 2 isn’t a free to play game,it was £30-£35 on disc when it first came out, it is currently £29.99 on PSN but obviously it was free for a month.
TSBonyman
My bad, i got it wrong. Forgot it was on plus and not ftp – and i know ftp games can make money – but what with it being relatively new i expected that as a “ftp” game it would require some time before it might begin to see enough of a return for them to start investing in optimisations and such.
And i guess the 4 hour thing isn’t quite what it seemed after all.
Stefan L
That’s why so many f2p games go through closed and open beta, have early access, paid access, and so on. It’s to get the revenue trickling in. That said, there will be an initial fund of investment to draw upon (you’d hope), and you can’t simply have your developers twiddling their thumbs waiting for the first million bucks to have been made. They’re still on the clock!
Stefan L
Killing Floor 2 isn’t a free to play game – it being on PS+ is a different matter entirely – but even if it was, free to play doesn’t mean that a game can’t make millions and millions of dollars and sustain itself through years of active development.
Additionally, “4 hours to get up and running” does not mean this was the sum total amount of time they spent on this version of the game before coming to such a specific conclusion. It means it took 4 hours to get the game working on Xbox One X in a fashion that was identical to the base Xbox One version.
MrYd
There’s a more important question than how much the game costs, how much effort it’s worth putting in to getting it running on a 1X, or even how many 1Xs MS might manage to sell…
Does anyone want to do the Monday night shenanigans again? Kind of missed it last week. You don’t have to be any good, you just have to avoid poor weapon choices (‘splodey-gun is infinitely better than a spade) and enjoy the chaos. And provide some entertaining squeals of panic every now and then.
Starman
4 hours work is hardly a big commitment. Stop being so negative.
MrYd
That was exactly my point. 4 hours work isn’t a big commitment. Which is why quickly knocking up 1X support in an afternoon is probably worth doing, even for such a small (probably) number of users.
Starman
With your mindset nothing would ever be made would it?