Xbox One struggling to keep up with PS4?

Recent rumours have surfaced suggesting there is a power gap between the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, with Call of Duty: Ghosts now allegedly running at 720p on the Xbox One and 1080p on the Playstation 4.

The rumours surfaced after Infinity Ward opted to use Playstation 4 video captures to show off new footage of gameplay in an exclusive interview with IGN. Infinity Ward had previously shown all gameplay on the Xbox One, also ostensibly at 1080p resolution.

Leakers on the notorious NeoGAF forums then began to drop hints that the video gameplay from previous Xbox One reveals were upscaled from 720p. One user, CBOAT, an anonymous industry insider on the forums, confirmed that not only was Ghosts running at a native 720p, but that this was also the case with Titanfall.

“We already know, Titanfall also. Not cool to hold back on stuff we can’t interact or tell the truth with, even if its [our] job to obfuscate rather than educate. Transparency is better when dealing with this position. Whatever, though,” he wrote in a typically cryptic fashion.

Another leaker on the forums, Peter “famousmortimer” Dodd noted that his own source confirmed that Infinity Ward was targeting native 720p on the Xbox One, with the surprising revelation that 1080p was the target resolution on the Playstation 4.

Call of Duty Ghosts

With the obvious hardware gap between the two consoles, both in terms of speed and compute power, it was expected for some time that Xbox One titles may have to undergo a lot more optimisation to run acceptably at 1080p.

Forza 5 Motorsport, a first-party title Xbox One, has previously been confirmed to run at a fluid 60 frames per second at 1080p, and Ryse: Son of Rome dropped slightly to 900p to maintain playability while delivering incredible detail. Both of these games, along with Dead Rising 3, look really impressive on the Xbox One.

Ryse developers Crytek even admitted that dropping to 900p was a “design decision” and that the same game on the Playstation 4 would have looked and run in exactly the same way.

Neither Microsoft nor Infinity Ward have commented on the rumours. In previous interviews and on Twitter, Microsoft has confirmed that any titles running at a native 720p or 900p on the Xbox One will be scaled to 1080p automatically.