id Tech 5 was designed from the ground up for 60fps gameplay, so what kind of results could be extracted from it now all the power of the new generation of consoles is at its disposal? With last week's release of Machine Games' Wolfenstein: The New Order, we finally found out. In our initial performance analysis, we went in search of the first cross-platform 1080p60 first-person shooter and while the game mostly delivered, the dicovery of a dynamic resolution suggested that, once again, PlayStation 4 had managed to trump its Microsoft rival.
After first isolating an obvious example of the tech at work on Xbox One, a more detailed look at the captures revealed that both versions of the game achieve their locked 60Hz update by adjusting the amount of pixels rendered at any given point, in effect balancing engine load in order to put consistent refresh and controller response first.Having now completed our analysis, it's clear that the PS4 gains an advantage with smaller drops in resolution that occur less frequently than they do on Xbox One. Metrics in the area of 1760x1080 are found on PS4, while on the Xbox One this can drop to an extreme of 960x1080 in some scenes. This is usually identifiable by an increase in the amount of jaggies on screen, along with a slightly fuzzier appearance to the already gritty aesthetic that Machine Games employs throughout the game.Featuring a similar file size on all platforms (around 40GB) the same artwork is used across the PS4, Xbox One and PC versions of Wolfenstein, with environments featuring a mix of incredibly high and extremely low-resolution textures. Despite asset parity, the level of anisotropic filtering is slightly higher on the consoles. Streaming is handled to a similar degree across all formats with variable levels of texture pop-in between the three platforms. There's no clear winner here - all three have issues at various points, although PS4 and PC owners should be able to improve matter by installing an SSD into those systems.So just how scalable is id Tech 5? The true test of the engine would be to compare the results of the new consoles with the last. Unfortunately Bethesda didn't send us last-gen code, but we borrowed the PS3 version and stacked it up against The New Order running on PS4 to see the key advantages the new consoles bring to the game. Naturally, the target resolution is pegged at 720p on PS3, but a dynamic framebuffer regularly results in sub-HD visuals as the engine attempts to hold a solid 60fps - just as it did in the PS3 version of Rage. This results in a somewhat murkier look, with fuzzier geometry edges - exacerbated by the lack of anti-aliasing - and blurrier textures.
http://www.eurogamer...-order-face-off
