Your Thoughts on Features to Ease the Performance Impact of Ray Tracing

[zliqdedo]

Conveniently, the cases that you say look better, don't have have comparisons, so we have no idea what the native resolutions would look like.

Scaling is always softer than native. The very act of scaling softens images.

There are comparisons in my previous, longer post - N16 in this thread. The very first image is a 3-way comparison where one of the shots is PC at native 4K.

It's convenient because on PC you wouldn't be at the mercy of some dev, you'd be able to pick your own settings and leverage the technology in the best way for you; you certainly wouldn't try to fill a 4K screen with just 2.88m pixels, with two passes no less - one reconstruction and one standard upscale, like they did with Watch Dogs on console. It goes without saying.

Nobody is arguing that native isn't the sharpest, just that modern scaling can come surprising close, close enough to even sway some purists, and become a viable mechanism through which to free up resources for other things, like ray tracing.

Here are some videos, obviously not as good as the lossless files you can get from DF, but playing them on a 4K screens gives some idea of what to expect. Pay attention to AC on Xbox, which is a 1800p scale, and God of War, which is a reconstruction from about 4m pixels, i.e. even less - two times less than 4K.

 

[crisium]

Red Dead Redemption 2 does 1920x2160 which is interesting. Half the pixels of 4k, but looks quite sharp because 1:1 pixel mapping vertically. I do notice minor artifacts.

No comparison possible to true 3840x2160 as there is no PC version.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...d-dead-redemption-2-uses-the-power-of-ps4-pro

It's about the same pixel count as 1512p-1530p or so. Seeing that Horizon pic posted earlier of 1512p upscaling, it definitely looks like checkerboarding or half horizontal res is the way to go. I'd love to be able to try 1920x2160 myself in PC games to compare it.

 

[Guru]

On PC we don't need this upscaling crap no matter what, because you can only run the game as good as one's individual GPU. So what benefit is there to running upscaled to 4k if I have to reduce quality to medium?

I'd rather play 1080p with maxed settings, than play 4k at medium settings. To me 1080p at max looks WAY WAY better than even pure 4k but with medium settings. Once you check the shadows and lightning and textures to medium, you will be getting poor graphics.

So to me, there is little use case scenarios where upscaling would make a positive difference to the user. For consoles its different because if they are getting say 40fps, but their target is 30fps, they can sacrifice 10fps to upscale the game to look very very slightly better. Again they are likely using a mix of medium and high settings on the consoles with 1080p reso and getting say 40fps, so they will sacrifice 10fps to get the upscaling to 4k. And this is across ALL PS4 PRO's, ALL Xone X.

If you notice ps4 and xone don't do it, because they can barely even run games at 30fps with medium settings at 1080p, let alone if you add upscaling.

 

[crisium]

On PC we don't need this upscaling crap no matter what, because you can only run the game as good as one's individual GPU. So what benefit is there to running upscaled to 4k if I have to reduce quality to medium?

I'd rather play 1080p with maxed settings, than play 4k at medium settings. To me 1080p at max looks WAY WAY better than even pure 4k but with medium settings. Once you check the shadows and lightning and textures to medium, you will be getting poor graphics.

Your'e missing the entire point. These techniques are not 1080p max vs 4k medium - they are the alternative to that binary choice on a 4k screen.

They are for when you can run max quite a bit higher than 1080p, but not at 4k. They add an alternative of the equivalent of the rendering power of ~1440p-~1800p max on a 4k screen.

And some of them, especially checkerboarding when done properly, look far better than 1080p.

If we get checkerboarding in the style of Horizon or RDR2 on PC, then we add yet another choice to when we can't max out 4k.

Right now on a 4k display we often have these choices:
1080p max
between resolution max with vanilla scaling (not ideal scaling)
4k reduced settings

Why not add these to our options:
4k checkerboarding
4k dynamic resolution