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Assassin's Creed Syndicate Just Got Pro Support

Planet

Member
Uh... yes it is.
Argument by Repetition is a form of art. Argument by Repetition is a form of art.
I was conjecturing on the amount of pixels fed into the algorithm would 'add up' to 900p if rendered normally.
You just don't "p" with checkerboard at start, it is short for progressive scan and means the entire picture at once, while checkerboard has more in common with the opposite, interlaced. But I know that little letter is used widely to describe canvas sizes of (mostly) 16:9 aspect ratio by just giving the vertical resolution.

The amount of pixels in a 900p image is rather low, just 1,440,000. I don't know any game on the pro working checkerboard with that few pixels. Take 1800p checkerboard rendering for example, it is used by a number of games like Watchdogs 2 or Infamous (SS / FL). That requires twice the amount of pixels (2,880,000) to be rendered fully.
What do you guys think is happening here and with World of Final Fantasy then?
I have no clue what happens in WoFF, but here I guess they just used a wonky upscaling technique and didn't bother to check the results.
 

Lister

Banned
what's yours?

are you going by the factually wrong idea that it scales from XXXXp to YYYYp (with YYYY > XXXX)

or are you just arguing semantics "well it does create additional pixel information each frame, so it's technically a scaling method"?

if it's the latter ... let's just not go there ;)

You'll have to explain this one to me, or maybe hook me up with a link.

As I understand it, and I may be wrong here so fele free to correct me, you are rendering a checkboard pattern of one frame (say the black squares), and interpolating the rest of the pixels (white squares) using information from a previous one (and possibly an AA buffer?).

If you are interpolating pixels, you are upscaling. It doesn't matter that you interpolate them from data in a previous frame, or a buffer, or the magical land of narnia. If those pixels are being generated as part of the native frame, then it's interpolation. I mean, it's one hell of an awesome upscaling method, with a much better quality to performance cost ratio than traditional bicubic interpolation using just the current pixels in the frame.

Again, willing to be proven wrong, if you've got a link. Don't want to necessarily derail this thread.
 

Fliesen

Member
You'll have to explain this one to me, or maybe hook me up with a link.

As I understand it, and I may be wrong here so fele free to correct me, you are rendering a checkboard pattern of one frame (say the black squares), and interpolating the rest of the pixels (white squares) using information from a previous one (and possibly an AA buffer?).

If you are interpolating pixels, you are upscaling. It doesn't matter that you interpolate them from data in a previous frame, or a buffer, or the magical land of narnia. If those pixels are being generated as part of the native frame, then it's interpolation. I mean, it's one hell of an awesome upscaling method, with a much better quality to performance cost ratio than traditional bicubic interpolation using just the current pixels in the frame.

Again, willing to be proven wrong, if you've got a link. Don't want to necessarily derail this thread.

so it's the latter :p
You're pretty much right by what happens, but it's debatable whether or not this can be considered scaling. For one - it doesn't change the scale of the image. ;)
Secondly, (in the case of 1800p checkerboard) you start off with an 3200x1800 frame and end up with an 3200x1800 frame. Half of the pixels are being rendered "at a different time", but you're still not changing the pixel count, nor the aspect ratio of the frame.
I think that's why most people say "It's not scaling"

also, it's rather misleading since it spreads the misconception of "checkerboarding from 1800p to 2160p" happening, or rather keeps that kind of misconception alive.
When people hear scaling, they imagine a bump / drop in rendering resolution.
 

Planet

Member
Upscaling takes a complete image and produces a complete image of bigger size. Checkerboard rendering is related, but not quite that. It takes a half finished base image of the same canvas size as the target and fills in the blanks with information based on the existing pixels and previous frames' data.
 

Lister

Banned
so it's the latter :p
You're pretty much right by what happens, but it's debatable whether or not this can be considered scaling. For one - it doesn't change the scale of the image. ;)
Secondly, (in the case of 1800p checkerboard) you start off with an 3200x1800 frame and end up with an 3200x1800 frame. Half of the pixels are being rendered "at a different time", but you're still not changing the pixel count, nor the aspect ratio of the frame.
I think that's why most people say "It's not scaling"

also, it's rather misleading since it spreads the misconception of "checkerboarding from 1800p to 2160p" happening.
When people hear scaling, they imagine a bump / drop in rendering resolution.

I see your point. And yeah, I can see it being misleading, or more specifically, inaccurate, as traditional upscaling is likely what would be inferred by just saying upscaling.

I still think of it as an upscaling method though, and I think it's silly to argue that it isn't, as opposed to making sure everyone understands it's NOT traditional upscaling, something which I don't think anyene in here thinks. But I guess we are left arguing semantics.
 

dr_rus

Member
No this is not checkerboard rendering. checkerboard rendering is not a up-scaling method.

There's something strange going on here, like they are checkerboarding two linearly upscaled to 4K 900p frame buffers for some mysterious reason (both for checkerboardsing and linear upscale). This is certainly a botched implementation and it may actually use checkerboarding in a wrong fashion which would explain these moire artifacts.
 

Shari

Member
You'll have to explain this one to me, or maybe hook me up with a link.

As I understand it, and I may be wrong here so fele free to correct me, you are rendering a checkboard pattern of one frame (say the black squares), and interpolating the rest of the pixels (white squares) using information from a previous one (and possibly an AA buffer?).

If you are interpolating pixels, you are upscaling. It doesn't matter that you interpolate them from data in a previous frame, or a buffer, or the magical land of narnia. If those pixels are being generated as part of the native frame, then it's interpolation. I mean, it's one hell of an awesome upscaling method, with a much better quality to performance cost ratio than traditional bicubic interpolation using just the current pixels in the frame.

Again, willing to be proven wrong, if you've got a link. Don't want to necessarily derail this thread.

You are absolutely right in both the explanation and definition. It's fancy upscaling or upscaling with a different algorithm.

Whether a vsync technique is triple buffered or not its still vsync, doesn't actually matter than one gives a much better result than the other.

Same goes for anti aliasing, it's not because MSAA is much better than FXAA that its not an antialiasing technique.
 

thelastword

Banned
just compared them both in photoshop like-for-like. and they both have the same pixilated IQ when you blow up the 1080p capture to 4k res. with the 4k version having marginal benefits to clarity in the distance. but yeah, this thing is clearly not rendering above 900p.

poor showing ubi. you may as well not have bothered.
It seems like a Pro patch gone wrong. I suspect they attempted to do 1800p or 2160p Checkerboard rendering on the PS4 Pro or perhaps even Geometry rendering. Something definitely went wrong, maybe the intern did it, but I'm sure it will be fixed...The Ezio collection has a 4k mode that works well.

Some guy I know that works at Ubisoft swears that the new version renders at 1080p on both PS4 and PS4 Pro, but the images shown here are clearly 900p. Does anyone else have the game installed without patch to take some screens and then post the same screens after the patch to provide more evidence of 900p or 1080p?
If that is the case, then I always knew and insisted that the PS4 versions of these games both Unity and Syndicate should be 1080p on the base PS4, if they feel obliged to do this now, I think that's great for vanilla PS4 users, but I imagine the Pro version should be running at higher than 1080p, because they did specify a 4k mode for that version..........

Well....... unless they intended a high performance mode "as well as" a 4k mode on the Pro, now that would be swell...

Yep, I see now. It just looks 900p.

I'm 90% sure of what checkerboarding is - though I'm happy to be corrected. I know how the algorithm works. I was conjecturing on the amount of pixels fed into the algorithm would 'add up' to 900p if rendered normally. I think that looking at it again and other comments that image would be different if it was doing that - so I was wrong about that.

What do you guys think is happening here and with World of Final Fantasy then?

900p would never be a base resolution for checkerboard rendering on the PRO, the minimum base resolution you can have is 1080p on that platform.
 

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
Hopefully this is a staggered patch and the next one is the games resolution....one can hope.
Why would you render the UI in 4k on 900p game?
Why would you upscale from 900p?
 

Elginer

Member
Goddamit! I just got this from the PSN sale after reading it had Pro support. Was hoping for at least a decent 1080p native. Ubisoft fix this shit!!!
 

MaLDo

Member
I see your point. And yeah, I can see it being misleading, or more specifically, inaccurate, as traditional upscaling is likely what would be inferred by just saying upscaling.

I still think of it as an upscaling method though, and I think it's silly to argue that it isn't, as opposed to making sure everyone understands it's NOT traditional upscaling, something which I don't think anyene in here thinks. But I guess we are left arguing semantics.


A similar discussion about this topic after post #126 here

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=224899326#post224899326
 

Wagram

Member
would rather have a performance boost for Unity @1080p imo. That depiction of Paris was truly beautiful, let down only by its performance. (its following patches helped though)

I would rather deal with the performance issues in Unity again than suffer through that combat and movement.
 

pottuvoi

Banned
Nearest neighbor upscaling, last time it fucked up a game was that hideous Ratchet and Clank psp game.
fYTbFHL.png


what kind of artifacts are these?

My guess is that game uses LOD transformation dithering.
The weird pattern likely comes from using nearest neighbor upscaling.

Yup.
2.4x Nearest neighbor gives identical pattern to classic 2x2 BW checkerboard. (900p to 4k)
2yMkqAc.png


Simple bilinear scaling would be a lot better.
 

Shari

Member
Are you sure? I thought that with checkerboard rendering, no scaling took place at all.

Data is being generated where it isn't, whether you do that by duplicating or filling the gaps on a deferred context it doesn't change the point of the technique.
 
Sucks this patch is a mess. This game is on sale for $8 in black Friday at target and I am looking to get a copy...

There is probably a better than good chance this will be fixed. For $8.00 if's probably a pretty low level of risk. Just might have to sit on the game for a week or two.
 

televator

Member
We have up scaling and down scaling to make images bigger or smaller. How about we call checkerboarding something like "lateral scaling?"
 

Jedi2016

Member
I was under the impression that playing a game on PS4 Pro would, at the very least, be an identical experience to playing it on a regular PS4.

Shit like this could lead people to question their purchase decision when the "Pro" version of a game looks and runs worse than its OG counterpart. Especially when there's no option to play the games in "Standard PS4" mode.. you have to use the "improvements" if you're playing on a Pro.

What the fuck, Ubi?
 

televator

Member
Think the word you're looking for is interpolation

I understand what the process technically is called. And on it's own it's not good at differentiating, since interpolation is used in traditional scaling too anyway. I just wish there was some easier way to describe this and avoid arguments that just further confuse people who aren't in the know. Hell it took me a few weeks to understand just what the fuck people were talking about. Parsing through shit arguments just saying "It's not scaling. lol" Made things difficult.
 

Chiggs

Member
Pro "support."

I was under the impression that playing a game on PS4 Pro would, at the very least, be an identical experience to playing it on a regular PS4.

Shit like this could lead people to question their purchase decision when the "Pro" version of a game looks and runs worse than its OG counterpart. Especially when there's no option to play the games in "Standard PS4" mode.. you have to use the "improvements" if you're playing on a Pro.

What the fuck, Ubi?

Bloodborne is another example. Its performance was never great on the PS4, and it's even worse on the PS4 Pro.
 

Harlequin

Member
Is that the definition of scaling?

Depends. If you look at the dimensions of the image as a whole, no. But if you look at the number of pixels (and, in turn, the amount of screen estate) being rendered, yes. There's an increase in pixels, meaning an increase in area so you could certainly call it upscaling.
 

b0uncyfr0

Member
Unless the game is heavily discounted i really wouldn't encourage anyone to pick it up. Its seriously repetitive and does nothing new in the game.
 
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