Update: Microsoft contacted me to let me know that native 1440p is coming soon but not yet implemented. Also, Kevin Gammill tweeted the following:

1440 resolution support is coming soon and is not yet implemented.

Continuing its proud tradition of making announcements via its employees’ personal Twitter accounts, Microsoft revealed this week that the Xbox One X will support native 1440p output too.

And, yes, this kind of thing makes me bat-shit crazy.

“On [Xbox One] X, we will effectively output native over HDMI in this case at 1440p [when connected to a 1440p monitor],” Microsoft’s Kevin Gammill tweeted in response to a question.

To be clear what this means, Xbox One X Enhanced games can support the new console in a variety of ways. For the optimal video quality, they can output at true 4K/UHD (also called 2160p) and 60 fps for the entire experience; Forza 7 Motorsport does this, for example. Or, they can vary the resolution based on what’s happening on-screen, perhaps lowering and raising it as needed. Or they can support other resolutions, including 1080p and 1440p.

The question Gammill was addressing was about 1440p displays. But he had noted earlier in the thread that games that output natively at 1440p will be up-scaled (“up-rezzed”) to 2160p on a 4K/UHD display and super-sampled to 1080p on a Full HD/1080p set. If you happen to have a 1440p display, as I do on my PC, that game will output as its native resolution.

What we can infer from all this is that games will adapt on Xbox One according to the console type and the display type and that they will scale up and down, seamlessly and automatically. For example, a game written to 1080p would upscale to 1440p on a 1440p display.

So that’s good news, and Xbox One X will thus correctly support a broader range of display types than just Full HD and 4K/UHD.

Tagged with Xbox One X