14 DAY TRIAL // CD Projekt Red has confirmed that the gameplay demonstration for The Witcher 3 at E3 2014 last week ran on the Xbox One at a 900p native resolution and a 30fps framerate, although it's working hard to ensure that 1080p is reached on the Xbox One as easily as it is on the PS4.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt received some great details last week at E3 2014 and it even got a special gameplay demo at the Microsoft press conference.
Now, CD Projekt Red has revealed to Eurogamer that the Xbox One version on display at E3 2014 last week ran at a native resolution of 900p and a 30fps framerate. At the same time, it emphasized that it's working hard to optimize the gorgeous role-playing game for the PS4 and Xbox One.
"We're still optimising for Xbox One and PS4 so it should look better than that in theory," the studio's Executive Producer, John Mamais said. "But everything we're doing optimization wise for PS4 and Xbox One, we're also optimizing for PC. It's a cross-platform engine, so any optimization we do for one platform goes into the other platform and just speeds it up, basically."
According to the developer, The Witcher 3 is currently running at 900p on the Xbox One but the goal is 1080p, even if Microsoft and even Sony are advising it that 900p is no problem when it comes to being upscaled for a 1080p output.
"We will hit 900p no problem. We'd like to get it up to 1080p on Xbox One. That's our goal. Whether we can do it or not I don't know. We've got to squeeze everything we can out of the hardware. Microsoft and Sony say 900p is the sweet spot, and there's not a lot of difference visually between 900p and 1080p, but it's a hot topic now. So that's what my goal is."
Mamais also revealed that the PS4 version of The Witcher 3 is running already at a native 1080p resolution, as it has more power, despite being a bit trickier to program for because it doesn't have a DirectX-like API.
"It's just a slightly more powerful machine," Mamais said about the PS4. "That's pretty known. But I think in the longer run everything is going to be on both platforms running at 1080p. It's just taking developers longer to do it than they expected because the architecture is a little more challenging on the Xbox One."
"It's actually easier to develop for Xbox One for us because we're PC developers. So everything we do on PC is for DirectX 11. And Xbox is also based on DX. So for the rendering side it's a more natural progression for us to go to Xbox. But we anticipate being able to do 1080p on PS4 a little bit easier than on the Xbox."
As such, The Witcher 3 fans shouldn't be worried about the game not looking gorgeous on the PS4 or Xbox One when it launches in February of 2015.