Is Anthem's E3 reveal the real deal on Xbox One X?

[Administrator]

As a 'one more thing' closing zinger for the Microsoft E3 2017 media briefing, the reveal of BioWare's Anthem is hard to beat. A highly polished six-minute gameplay demo - or 'vertical slice' - the code is said to be running on Xbox One X hardware and it looks simply incredible. But from The Witcher 3 to Watch Dogs 2 and Destiny, we've been burnt before by preview teasers that exhibited noticeable downgrades when final code eventually hits stores. Armed with a pristine 4K capture of the trailer direct from Microsoft's on-site media riser, we set out to answer the question - is this the real deal?
Let's bang one nail on the head right away: resolution. Anthem is running at 3840x2160 in this demo, but it does so using checkerboard rendering. Looking through our capture, we noted distinctive artefacting on moving edges, presenting as a faint criss-cross pattern where only half the pixels are shaded. The presentation still looks pin-sharp, even with a compromise that effectively halves native 4K resolution. The technique works for three reasons: firstly, the human eye can't really track precision detail in motion (checkerboarding looks very good on slower motion scenes), secondly 'sample and hold' LCD technology cuts resolved resolution in motion, and finally the tiny pixel pitch on 4K screens makes discerning pixel-level detail extremely difficult any way.
This is not a trivial implementation of the technique by the Frostbite team - it's the result of a concentrated R&D effort that initially aimed to exploit the power of the PlayStation 4 Pro GPU for 4K display owners, and we've already seen a successful roll-out of the technology in BioWare's own Mass Effect Andromeda, running at a lesser 1800p on PS4 Pro. It's not a 'true 4K', but the fact that we're seeing it in the Anthem demo lends more weight to this as an authentic Xbox One X reveal. If there's any doubt as to whether it's a PC version running at max settings, to an extent this puts that to rest - Frostbite aims for full native rendering in its PC incarnation.
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