Assassin's Creed 4 PS4 update will upgrade resolution from 900p to 1080p

UPDATE: The patch to enhance Assassin's Creed 4's visuals on PS4 in now live, Ubisoft has revealed. Now the game can be played in its true 1080p splendor with more advanced ani-aliasing tech.

ORIGINAL STORY: Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag's PS4 version may currently only run at 900p resolution, but an update will be out "shortly after release" sprucing it up to a nice and shiny 1080p.

Ubisoft community manager Gary Steinman explained on the Ubisoft Blog that the game originally shipped in 900p to ensure that the framerate wouldn't drop below 30 fps. "Finishing the game at 900p gave the development team the extra room in terms of the GPU and CPU usage to ensure the framerate never dips below 30 frames per second," he stated before adding "The team then used the time between the ship date and the release to focus on a title update that could deliver native 1080p resolution on the PS4."

Associate producer Sylvain Trottier noted that the updated graphics will be a very mild improvement as the game already looks great, especially on next-gen consoles. "If it's running at 720p vs 1080p, you're going to notice the difference, by far," Trottier explained. "But if it's set at a resolution that's very close, where most of the pixels are already there in internal processing, most people won't see any difference."

Another benefit of the update is that it will implement new anti-aliasing technology, something Trottier suggested is actually more significant than the higher resolution. "The most important part of this title update is not necessarily 1080p native resolution," he teased. "It's the fact that even when we were done with the project, even when we were finished with the certification and everything else, even when most of the engineers had started to work on other projects - like we always do at Ubisoft - some of my engineers continued to work on Black Flag and they even developed a brand-new anti-aliasing technique."

"Along with the full 1080p native resolution, the visuals have been improved even further, simply because the engineers knew that with the additional time they could do even more. So they did. And now, not only will you see every single miniscule pixel in glorious 1080p native resolution on the PS4 - exactly as the artists rendered it - but you'll also see an even cleaner, clearer and more brilliant moving image than anyone even imagined."

Thankfully, this new anti-aliasing feature won't just be for PS4, but Xbox One as well.