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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.
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(Score: 2) by blackhawk on Saturday September 24 2016, @06:01PM
I'm sitting a little over 6 feet from a 55 inch TV, so my viewing experience isn't the same as yours sitting god knows how far from a 32 inch screen. The screen is quite probably larger in my field of view than you are used to.
I'm working on writing a game now, so I have a few opinions on 4k gaming, and that's mainly that it isn't going to be worth a damn for 4+ years. We need to wait a while for the high end graphics cards to catch up to what the monitors and TVs can output. It puts a tremendous strain on the CPU / GPU and even memory architecture to push all that data out the HDMI connector. If you can spend $1000USD on a video card or get a pair of 980s then you can play in 4k now, but for most it is out of reach. I'd rather hit 60+ FPS at a stable rate than worry about 4K for gaming. And before you ask, yes I can damn well see when a game is running above 30FPS, it's jittery and janky as hell anything below about 55FPS for me. 60FPS is usually fine, but for VR I don't feel quite right unless it's 90FPS.
I honestly wouldn't have bought a 4K TV at this time. I had a perfectly good Sony Bravia which was 9 years old and had a great picture at 1080p. It eventually burnt out the capacitor on the backlight (I believe) and would no longer show anything more than a blank screen when starting up.
Given I had to replace the TV the choice came down to saving a few bucks now and getting a 1080p, or future proofing and getting a TV I will enjoy for the next 5+ years. The 4K TV has greater colour gamut, improved motion handling, improved black levels and a better picture in so many ways over the cheaper sets - it wasn't hard to decide to drop the money and get a TV I would still want to use several years from now when 4k content starts to come out.