All in all, we can only give a preliminary outline of how Battlefield 4 will run on next-gen consoles, but there's plenty here that should remain the case for the final release in November. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that, in this near-finalised state, the PS4 offers a superior experience on several fronts. The resolution is higher at 1600x900, as compared to the tried and tested 1280x720 on Xbox One, suffering as it does for more visible aliasing artefacts. Visually, the PS4 has a marked advantage with ambient occlusion effects too, which simply isn't matched on Microsoft's platform with the build we played.

It's a shame that the upscaling issues on PS4 pull it back from absolute dominance in terms of image quality and performance that the metrics suggest we should be getting. However, the games are running at equivalent to high settings on the PC version, while cut-backs in lighting, effects and draw distance mean we can play through the campaign at an almost uninterrupted 60fps. It can be argued that the image quality could have been raised a notch to the PC's ultra setting if not for this ambitious refresh target, especially given the frame-rate's struggles in multiplayer. On balance though, the performance is solid, if not quite optimal for 64 player maps at present.

On the merits of what we've seen so far, Battlefield 4 is already set to be a formidable launch window effort from DICE. Our observations so far reveal a clear gap in fidelity between PC and PS4, and again to Xbox One, but sub-pixel break-up aside, based on what we've seen so far, the Microsoft console manages to hold up despite the undeniable, quantifiably worse metrics in terms of both resolution and frame-rate.

While we've been able to come to some interesting conclusions thus far, we have to stress that this is far from the definitive, final word - it's an assemblage of observations on image quality and performance acquired outside of standard conditions and indicative only of the build we saw at the event, running on development hardware. We will be revisiting the game on retail consoles and giving the Xbox One Kinect and multiplayer modes the vigorous testing they deserve. Over and above that, despite all the next-gen excitement, we shouldn't forget that there are still the current-gen versions of the game to cover too. Our Battlefield 4 coverage is far from complete - there's much, much more to come.