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Shadow Warrior made a splash last year on PC with impressive visuals and kinetic action, but high system requirements left us wondering how well it would translate to console. With developer Flying Wild Hog announcing a target of 60 frames per second on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One earlier this year, it was clear this was an ambitious project. Of course, hitting 60fps and delivering a consistent experience are two different things. Can PS4 and Xbox One attain and sustain the target?Shadow Warrior is built on a unique, in-house graphics technology known as the Road Hog Engine, first used in Hard Reset on PC. For Shadow Warrior, the team introduced a host of improvements, including completely dynamic lighting, parallax occlusion mapping (POM), and screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO). All of these elements have been successfully translated onto console with minimal loss in quality. In its original PC form, one of the game's limitations was its inability to scale well across CPU cores, translating into performance issues with specific settings. So how well do the console versions fares against the PC original?
The PS4 and Xbox One versions of Shadow Warrior operate at 1080p and 900p respectively. Image quality is crisp on PS4 and although a bit blurrier, it's still relatively clean on Xbox One. Post-process anti-aliasing along the lines of FXAA does a decent job of smoothing out edges without overly blurring the image. Considering the target frame-rate, image quality is acceptable in both cases, though clearly PS4 has the advantage. However, last year's PC version still has the real edge in this regard with support for arbitrary resolutions and additional hardware MSAA. The game demands some hardware muscle to operate smoothly though, making higher resolutions difficult to reach with a consistent performance level on many PCs.
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