Face-Off: Outlast

[Administrator]

More than six months into the life of the new consoles and it's become clear that platform parity between Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is rare. Sure, the odd platformer or sports title, such as Strider or FIFA 14, have managed to achieve this but those are exceptions. Utilisation of the last-gen Unreal Engine 3 hasn't made much difference either, with cross-platform titles suffering from frame-rate or resolution discrepancies. In the case of Outlast though, developer Red Barrels and UE3 have come up trumps. And in these days the novelty of platform parity makes it kind of interesting to examine.
Perhaps it's because the developer has had time to optimise the game for each platform. While Outlast is fresh and new on Xbox One, the game was first released on the PC last summer and this February on PS4. The results are compelling: Outlast stands out as one the few cross-platform games designed to deliver 1080p and 60fps on both consoles. In fact, image quality is virtually identical between the two systems, with only a slight variation in default brightness separating the two. Anti-aliasing wise, both iterations make use of a post-process solution with all the hallmarks of FXAA. Thankfully, Outlast is a very dark game which makes heavy use of post-processing effects so texture blur is generally kept to a minimum. Overall, the game looks crisp and clean on both consoles to the point that it's almost impossible to tell the two apart just looking at screenshots.
On PC, the developers neglected to include any in-game adjustable anti-aliasing options, instead leaving this up to the users to enable externally. Forcing FXAA produces results in line with the console and generally looks fine within the confines of the asylum, but more advanced options including different forms of MSAA, SGSSAA, and even super-sampling can all be forced at the driver level as well. The results are predictably superior to FXAA, but the tight corridors of the asylum don't really benefit as greatly as most titles, save for the elimination of in-surface aliasing.
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