Blow: Checkerboard Rendering on PS4Pro Isn't Completely Free, There Might Be Better Uses of the Power

Blow: Checkerboard Rendering on PS4Pro Isn't Completely Complimentary, There Might Be Meliorate Uses of the Power

Subsequently the announcement of PlayStation four Pro, several developers take confirmed their support for the enhanced console due to be released past Sony on November tenth.

One such programmer is Thekla, the studio behind The Witness. Creator Jonathan Blow published a blog post with some details of the PS4 Pro patch the team is preparing, which is a bit different from the plans announced by other developers.

He was chosen out on the Neogaf board for non choosing to enable downsampling for those playing at 1080P, for case, and he promptly answered with an caption.

Actually, no, we care a lot about it. Nosotros are trying to carefully make decisions based on what is going to provide the highest image quality.

For example, we think doubling MSAA will give us a better result than rendering double the number of pixels and downscaling -- it's faster, and leaves more than performance on the tabular array for other features.

Examples of other features are things I mentioned in the posting, like having a longer streaming distance before the high-res meshes plow into low-res LODs. I retrieve that kind of LOD popping has a much bigger effect on visual quality than some extra pixels that but get downscaled again anyhow. And so if nosotros are able to put some of the GPU power into that, we feel it is the better choice.

HOWEVER, we might not be able to increase the LOD radius very much, because that besides requires retentiveness, and nosotros are already pushing the boundaries of the console's memory. In that example we might have GPU ability to burn, in which case possibly we might render at a resolution college than 1080p, with 4x MSAA also, and then downscale.

Only if I announce that right now, and then we finish up not doing information technology, we will go a lot of people yelling at us for betraying them. Then what I announced is the minimum that we tin definitely practise. And, as I said in the posting, none of this is completely concluding, and we volition announce the final tech specs when the patch is done.

In a subsequent post, he explained why checkerboard rendering (a technique that's already proving to be popular on PS4 Pro, equally nosotros explained yesterday) might not necessarily be the best use of the console's additional power, particularly since it's not completely free performance wise (despite being supported via hardware).

I think it depends on the particular game and engine. Dissimilar rendering pipelines are structured differently; for some pipelines, the cost of adding checkerboard rendering would exist very low, because they are already computing a lot of the data that checkerboard rendering needs. For other pipelines the toll might exist college. In our case we're just non sure of the total cost even so, but we think information technology is probably high plenty that nosotros may prefer to do a straight upscale. But nosotros're not completely certain.

(It is truthful that, equally Sony has announced, the PS4 Pro provides hardware back up for checkerboard rendering that makes it faster than it would otherwise be. I think in some places I have seen the rumor that checkerboard is completely free, but I would consider that an exaggeration: the toll is going to vary per game. Unfortunately due to NDAs I can't provide details; I tin't say anything more than about Sony technologies than what they take announced. It is definitely true that if you had a game running on the original PS4, and the developer wants to do the virtually straightforward thing to brand the game look better on the Pro, that developer could enable checkerboard rendering and the game will look better and run faster; so information technology's "complimentary" in that sense. But if yous are going to become picky most how yous are spending the GPU memory and bandwidth of the new machine, and then there are tradeoffs here, like with anything.)

Information technology'll exist interesting to see how different developers choose to use PlayStation 4 Pro (and, when information technology releases, Xbox One Scorpio) hardware.

Source: https://wccftech.com/blow-checkerboard-rendering-ps4pro-isnt-completely-free-might-better-uses-power/

Posted by: elliottlizintacer1944.blogspot.com

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