SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the hehe-they-said-pissing-hehe dept.
Get ready to endlessly debate the value of "native 4K" on consoles
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/microsoft-and-sonys-emerging-4k-pixel-pissing-contest/
Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro (launching in November) and Microsoft's Xbox One Scorpio (launching late next year) are giving the pixel-counters out there a new, 4K-sized battlefield to fight over. Now, Microsoft is drawing a line in the sand in that developing battle, with Microsoft Studios Publishing General Manager Shannon Loftis telling USA Today that "any games we're making that we're launching in the Scorpio time frame, we're making sure they can natively render at 4K."
The word "natively" is important there, because there has been a lot of wiggle room when it comes to talking about what constitutes a truly "4K" game these days. For instance, according to developers Ars has talked to, many if not most games designed for the PS4 Pro will be rendered with an internal framebuffer that's larger than that for a 1080p game, but significantly smaller than the full 3840×2160 pixels on a 4K screen (the exact resolution for any PS4 Pro game will depend largely on how the developer prioritizes the frame rate and the level of detail in the scene). While the PS4 Pro can and does output a full 4K signal, it seems that only games with exceedingly simple graphics will be able to render at that resolution natively.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday September 24 2016, @04:35PM
Isn't that what texture mipmapping solved?
A range of textures depending on the proximity of the viewer to the texture?
This stuff isn't limited by anything other than the processing power, and you can render any resolution you like. But without the back-end video memory to hold all the textures (including the mipmapped ones), and the processing to draw at that resolution (which quadruples every time you double the resolution, for example), you are constantly playing catchup.
How about an option to let people put it in the resolution they want, and get the relevant FPS on their hardware.
Then I'd do some metrics and collect HDMI device details, etc. - and I bet that a lot of those that select 4K don't have the hardware but "think" it makes a difference, and those that have 4K turn it down to get better FPS.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:15PM
Mipmapping isn't enough when the camera comes so close to a surface that even the largest texture in a set gets stretched. For example, every console since the Nintendo 64 has supported mipmapping in some form, but Goldeneye 007 for N64 still gets blurry as fcuk when facing a wall because the largest texture in a set couldn't be bigger than 64x64. That's more an issue of memory size, memory bandwidth (both within RAM and from permanent storage), and artist effort.