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720p, 792p, 900p - video games often operate at significantly lower native resolutions than the 1080p output of the console may suggest. We've discussed at length our opinions on how much this actually matters to the gameplay experience (generally speaking, 900p isn't as much of a visual comedown as the raw maths suggest) but in this piece, we'll be going into depth on how we actually make the calculations - and how you can produce your own analyses.Pixel-counting - as it's known - is a fairly simple procedure. Back in the day, we would require access to lossless captures from the consoles in making our analysis, requiring an expensive capture card. But in the current generation console era, Sony and Microsoft have made it very easy for everyone to gain access to premium quality screen captures - both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One allow users to produce PNG shots of in-game action that can be copied onto a USB stick then taken over to your computer for analysis.
And that's where the actual pixel-counting procedure takes place. What's required to ascertain native resolutions are long, preferably sharp geometric edges, preferably high contrast in nature to highlight the 'stair-step' edges of the line. From there, across what is generally a 30 pixel sample, we count the amount of stair-steps generated by the console. Assuming we're talking about vertical resolution, 20 steps from a 30 sample gives us this calculation - (20/30) x 1080. End result: 720p. If you see 25 steps, that's (25/30) x 1080... 900p.
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