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It's only a tiny slice of the final product of course - a taster of three years' hard graft from one of the most respected developers in the business - but the arrival of the Call of Duty: World War 2 beta gives us our first look at how Sledgehammer Games has evolved one of the most significant console engines of this generation, and how its work scales between PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro. The solid technical foundation of 2014's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has served several developers well over the last three years. After the disappointment of Ghosts, Sledgehammer's extensive rewrite of the COD engine truly leveraged the capabilities of current-gen systems. Its revision pushed the series to a new, more filmic post effects pipeline, materials-based lighting, and vastly improved facial animations. Performance was also exceptional, running smoothly across all platforms and scaling beautifully across PC hardware configurations.
Since then, evolved branches of that COD engine have powered the excellent Modern Warfare Remastered, with the most dramatic improvements beyond that found in Infinite Warfare (this presentation on how it pushed the tech is well worth a read). But those titles also diverged in how they supported PS4 Pro: MWR favoured a simple resolution upscale to 2880x1620, while the more ambitious Infinity Ward release offered up checkerboard rendering, temporal super-sampling and dynamic scaling, deeply integrated into the pipeline for a more full-on approach to getting the most out of the Pro's GPU. So how has Sledgehammer itself pushed on the engine?
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