Please learn how to make a goddamn cross-gen title.

Editor’s Note: “Dear Game Industry” is a cynical and angry column, and will often feature language not suited for readers under 27 years of age.

Dear Game Industry,

I would appreciate it if you didn’t assume that the gaming populace was fucking 80 years old and senile. I say this because it’s about the only fucking conclusion I can draw every time I see a framerate/resolution headline:

• http://blog.ubi.com/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-in-native-1080p-on-playstation-4/
• http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-18-thief-1080p-on-ps4-900p-on-xbox-one
• http://www.computerandvideogames.com/436075/confirmed-cod-ghosts-is-720p-on-xbox-one-1080p-on-ps4/

It really bugs me that the discussion that comes about whenever we see these articles is how the Playstation 4 compares to the Xbox One, and not the bigger, more egregious problem: How in the flying fuck is a game built for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 not running at 1080p/60fps on both of these systems?

It’s not 1998. We don’t have one set of graphical assets for a given title that have to somehow be shoehorned onto all platforms. We don’t have a situation where the faster, stronger, more graphically powerful platform needs a silly workaround like individually rendering blades of grass that were once a texture to showcase its capabilities. Chances are that your modern game is built for the PC, where graphical scalability is not a negotiable requirement. Games are regularly built nowadays to run on a PC with a graphics card that’s 8 years old but take full advantage of one that came out last week. And that’s what lets your 360 game not look out of place on its successor.

Therein lies the rub, however. These games run just fine on systems that are over half a decade old. They play without a problem on graphics hardware that was released before the advent and proliferation of *unified shaders, inexpensive anti-aliasing, and viable realistic lighting. The age-old exclude of taking a performance hit to get higher detail levels isn’t going to cut it because even at twice the framerate and pixel count, the Xbox One and Playstation 4 should still have leagues higher levels of detail present, what with 16 times the memory and +5 times the shader capacity of their predecessors.

I’ll end this with some simple math:

The Xbox 360 has a 10MB chunk of embedded memory on its graphics chip package. For the sake of discussion, this is enough memory for a 720p framebuffer (1280x720x32-bit color = 3.5MB) and a single G buffer of equal precision and resolution (another 3.5MB), with a smidgen extra for, say, very light anti-aliasing. 1080p uses nearly twice the pixel count, taking us to 7.9MB for each. So we’re at 16MB to go 1080p… out of the 32MB embedded onto the Xbox One’s graphics package… and the anti-aliasing options available on that chip use way less memory than the MSAA the 360’s chip was saddled with.

* The Xbox 360 had unified shaders, but the developments that have gone into optimizing this processing type make that version look frighteningly primitive compared to what’s possible on XB1/PS4.