Face-Off: Call of Duty: Ghosts

With the release of the PC version of Call of Duty: Ghosts, Infinity Ward offered up a first taste of its vision for the future of the megabucks Call of Duty franchise and now - finally - we have both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions in-house, allowing us to ascertain just how close the next-gen console editions will match up. In truth, we went into this feature with lowered expectations, the Resolutiongate debacle suggesting that, on Xbox One at least, Infinity Ward had significant issues coping with the transition to the new generation of console hardware.

Not that PlayStation 4 got off lightly, with the initial retail release suffering from performance problems, along with a bug that set native resolution to 720p instead of the previously announced full HD 1080p presentation - something that was recently addressed with a day-one patch. With all of this drama in mind, just how close do the next-gen consoles get to the PC gold standard, and are we looking at a worthwhile jump in quality that justifies the increased price tag that comes with next-generation software?

To kick things off, we start by taking a look at the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game - both patched and updated - with comparison video and screenshot assets. Here it's abundantly clear that one platform has a distinct advantage over the other owing to the vast resolution differential: fine details, subtle edges and complex scenery all appear sharper and more defined on PlayStation 4, while these elements simply aren't displayed with the same level of clarity on Xbox One, giving the game a distinctly fuzzy look that doesn't really tally with our expectations of a next-gen experience.

With the day-one patch enabled, we are looking at a native 1080p framebuffer on the new Sony console, backed up with a post-process anti-aliasing solution that looks very similar to FXAA. The crisp imagery associated with full HD visuals is clearly visible throughout the bombastic campaign and multiplayer modes, although the post-process AA leads to some light smoothing of texture details and specular highlights, giving the game a softer look than the PC version - which in all of our media we have operating with traditional multi-sampling (4x MSAA, in this case).