One of the most divisive elements for gamers surrounding the upcoming launch of the PlayStation 4 Neo and Xbox Scorpio revolves around screen resolution. Speaking with Sony president Shuhei Yoshida at a PS4 review event in New York, he said that there’s a practical reason developers aim for 4K: “I don't think any team is just fixated on 4K, it's just one of the options...but [4K] games allow you to be more precise and a better gamer. That's clearly the benefit.”

Yoshida offered an example focusing on Halo 5. “You immediately notice the difference compared to playing most games on Xbox One, like Halo 5 which was rendered at a dinamyc 1080p. You can clearly see the enemy in the fog, and with the accuracy of the Xbox One Elite Controller, you can aim and shoot at enemies with pixel-perfect accuracy.”

Posing the same question to Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS4 and director of Knack, he said, “Resolution does make a difference. One point of confusion is that people say, ‘Oh, you won’t notice the difference because you can’t resolve individual pixels unless you’re very close to the TV set.’ But even if you take a 4K image and scale it down to 1080P, it looks better. That’s called supersampling. It’s a very specific quality graphics technique.”

“In Forza Motorsport 7, for example, there is no 1080p mode,” he continued. “If you’re playing on a 1080p HD TV, they’re just scaling the 4K down, and it looks better than if they had produced that image at 1080p. All of the details of the scene are much more visible as a result.”