Harmonix’s Fantasia: Music Evolved Runs at 1080p and ‘Not 720p’ on Xbox One

With the recent revelations that several Xbox One titles including Call of Duty: Ghosts and more recently, Titanfall, are set to run at a resolution of 720p (upscaled to 1080p), I reached out to Harmonix, which is developing Fantasia: Music Evolved for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One to discuss the issue and to ask them, plain and simply, at what resolution their upcoming game will be running on either platform. 

The game's Lead Programmer Mike Fitzgerald got back to me with answers. 

"The Xbox One version of Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved runs at 1080p natively," said Fitzgerald "The Xbox 360 version is at 720p."

As for whether the team at Harmonix faced any difficulty in getting the game to run at a full 1080p, Fitzgerald said:

"There’s always a balance that needs to be struck between resolution, frame rate, and graphical fidelity. If you want to add a complicated lighting effect, for example, you may need to spend more time per-pixel rendering it. If you want to hit an aggressive frame rate goal without sacrificing your lighting and other effects, you might want to reduce your game’s effective resolution.

"Every game has to make tradeoffs on these three axes. With Fantasia: Music Evolved, we’ve been able to prioritize resolution and graphical fidelity while running at 30fps, which we feel successfully elicits the magic of Fantasia.

But why run the game at 1080p and not a lower resolution? "We’ve taken the opportunity to push the graphical fidelity of this game as far as we can," replied Fitzgerald. "The gameplay in Fantasia: Music Evolved only requires us to run at 30fps, which has let us focus on making our frame-to-frame visuals really shine."