Black bars!=more cinematic, but they are an artistic choice.

I've fully read your comments and understand you're not bashing the game. What you're doing is saying black bars=bad. They have bonuses like increased performance, but in a perfect world you believe they wouldn't be there. In some cases I'd agree with you. Lots of times black bars are just used to maintain the overall image quality. Dragon's Dogma was one of those games:

Beyond two souls is 50/50:

I think this game is really enjoying the benefit of black bars for performance, but it also feels like an artistic choice. Let's say dragon's dogma received a PS4 HD port. Would they cut the black bars? 99% chance they would. What about a Beyond HD port? They'd fix things like framerate and resolution, but would they ditch the aspect ratio or not? It's much harder to say. It's very much an artistic choice, but at the same time switching to 16:9 really doesn't take anything away from the game. I'd imagine this hypothetical HD port would have an option to toggle them on and off.

The order may very well turn out like Dragon's Dogma. Like you said they could just be doing bars because 1080p wasn't working. But, there's still the possibility that the aspect ratio just "works" for how the game is presented. It could be similar to beyond in that regard, or even take it to the next level. These guys are doing almost everything they can to re-create a film-like experience. They're putting a lot of power and time into camera effects to sell this idea to the player. If for some reason the "filmic" aspect ratio took more system performance than 16:9, I'd still expect these guys to go for it. The less intensive render is just a bonus ;)

Just zooming out won't look right, the sky and street ratio will be too high, it's all about framing correctly. The problem with tvs ofcourse is that they are fixed width as opposed to cinema screens that open up to the sides. Sit 35% closer to get the full effect.

And yes, only rendering 74% of the pixels is also a big help and black bars are far better than upscaling from 1600x900, 1:1 pixel ratio is a huge bonus. I also hope black bars will be used more often, I love the wider viewing angle if done right. Not for all games though, AC and Mirror's edge type games with a lot of vertical travel won't benefit from a wider angle.

And maybe a possibility for a cinematic adventure game 5 years from now, 3840x1600 at 24fps is only 18% more pixels per second as 1080p60.

Thank you for understanding where I'm coming from! You make good points, and I hope this game seriously kicks ass. The game looks gorgeous, and I hope they pull it off.
And no, I'm not saying black bars=bad. I'm just saying I'd prefer full screen. If it is for performance then, black bars=better than stretching the image. Either way, I'm fine with it. I'd just prefer full screen if they could do it. If it truly is their artistic approach, they're the designers, and I'm good there too. It's just preference, that's all.

It's technically 800p, but the total pixels rendered from 1920x800 (1,536,000) would make it 960p in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Either way, it's rather odd resolution for a game .-. Hopefully they make good use of the extra resources.

You make good points, and certainly sound like you know a lot more about good framing and photography than I do. It's just like I said to mr. Bro, full screen is just a preference, if it's a performance thing, I applaud them for it, if it's there artistic approach, that's ok too. If the game is as good as it looks, I'm all over it. Looking forward to this one more than any other ps4 game so far....

Actually it's technically 1080p, just with black bars on the top and bottom ;)

I thought the black bars weren't rendered by the PS4? 960p is the non black bar area anyway :P

I have no performance impact when running 4X MSAA on my PC, it doesn't even blink. :)

Typically consoles use Morphological Anti-Aliasing as it can be performed in the pixel shaders, it's essentially just a "smart framebuffer effect" that blurs the edges where the jaggies usually exist and it's usually "good enough" for most gamers. (Then again, if you're gaming on a console, you can't be to concerned about graphics anyway.)

The big downfall of MSAA however is that whilst it can fix the jagged edges on the edge of a polygon, it's next to useless with the internal areas of a polygon, the best form of Anti-Aliasing is SSAA or Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing, it's how Anti-Aliasing began, where a game is internally rendered at a much higher resolution then downscaled, which results in the best image quality at the cost of massive amounts of performance. (I.E. Way beyond the reach of a console.)
Converesly, you also have SGSSAA or Sparse Grid Supersampling Anti-Aliasing, which splits the scene up into a grid to lower the hardware requirements.

However, all forms of Anti-Aliasing have Pro's and Cons, depending on the scene and even the resolution it's being rendered at, so MSAA may be suited to this game, but it might be horrible for another, but there are other types of Anti-Aliasing which could achieve better results with less of a performance impact, depending on the scene, it all comes down to the developers.

They are produced in the game engine. The output to the TV is 1080p.

Saying The Order is 800p would be like walking up against a black wall in a game and saying the game is 0p. Kinda different, but yeah.

Huh, i didn't know that. I assumed the black bars were simply a product of a 2.4:1 imagine being put into a 16:9 box :P I suppose it would be more accurate to say the in-game area is 960p, with the total output being 1080p?

Calling it 800p is pretty silly though, even if technically right in regards to the game zone. But just because something is "technically right" doesn't mean its' actually right.