Sony is being hit with a lawsuit for "deceptive marketing" of Killzone: Shadow Fall because the game's multiplayer mode isn't a "true" 1080p resolution.

Douglas Ladore from California, filed the suit in the Northern District California court. He says that Sony advertised that the game runs at a native 1080p resolution but it "used a technological shortcut that was supposed to provide 'subjectively similar' results."

See, what Killzone does for the multiplayer component is render each frame at 960 by 1080 resolution with a "temporal upscale." On the next frame, the lines that were "blank" in the previous frame are rendered, also at 960 by 1080. So it's still technically rendering at 1920x1080, just not all in the same frame. The lawsuit says that Sony falsely advertised that the game would offer 1080p visuals.

Shortly after Digital Foundry discovered the 960 by 1080 rendering method used in Shadow Fall, they made a remark about it.
"In both [single-player] and [multiplayer], Killzone: Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60 [frames per second]," producer Poria Torkan wrote. "Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition.

"In Multiplayer mode, however, we use a technique called 'temporal reprojection,' which combines pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames to reconstruct a full 1080p image. If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native.

"When up-scaling an image from one resolution to another, new pixels are added by stretching the image in X/Y dimension," he said. "The values of the new pixels are picked to lie in between the current values of the pixels. This gives a bigger, but slightly blurrier picture.

"Temporal reprojection is a technique that tracks the position of pixels over time and predicts where they will be in future. These 'history pixels' are combined with freshly rendered pixels to form a higher-resolution new frame."

The lawsuit says that temporal reprojection is not native 1080p that was promised.

This plaintiff sounds like he'd be a blast at parties.
49. On or about May 3, 2014, Plaintiff Ladore purchased Killzone for $49.99 from a local Best Buy.

50. Before deciding to purchase Killzone, Plaintiff visited several websites that contained the representations disseminated by Sony—i.e., that Killzone would provide native "1080p" multiplayer graphics.

51. Relying on those reports, Plaintiff chose to purchase the Killzone video game using Best Buy's "free store pickup" service. Thus, Plaintiff reserved a copy of Killzone on Best Buy's website and traveled to a local Best Buy store to complete his purchase.

52. Before completing his purchase, and while still at his local Best Buy retail store, Plaintiff examined the Killzone retail packaging and confirmed that Killzone would deliver an unrestricted 1080p graphics resolution. The relevant part of that packaging was identical to that shown in Figure 1 above. Relying on that on-box representation—which echoed the reports he had read online—Plaintiff completed his purchase and took his copy of Killzone home.

53. Plaintiff Ladore relied on Sony's on-box representation that Killzone would deliver 1080p graphics resolution. Because Plaintiff owns a television capable of rendering a 1080p resolution, Plaintiff's television was capable of rendering Killzone's graphics (in both single and multiplayer modes) at a 1080p resolution.

54. After opening Killzone's packaging (thus rendering the game un-returnable) and playing the game, Plaintiff realized that the game's multiplayer graphics were not the "1080p" graphics that Sony advertised. Instead, Plaintiff noticed that Killzone's multiplayer graphics were blurry and did not appear to be rendering at a native 1080p resolution.

55. Had Plaintiff known that Killzone's multiplayer mode was not running at a graphics resolution of 1080p, he would have not have purchased Killzone at all, or would have paid substantially less for it.

(via Polygon, Kotaku)