It's not really in the context of native resolution, and by the definition you provided, a simple upscale would be native as well.
No one has argued that CBR is natively rendering the same number of pixels. I'm saying that it's rendering the same number of pixels, with half done in a different (less demanding but less accurate) manner.
While what is being produced on screen can, and should, be considered rendering. I think Colbert is referring to the number of pixels processed within the framebuffer. At least that's how I've interpreted things so far.
But it's very likely that there's no half-res framebuffer used in most CBR methods. People usually conceive of the process as sequential--first regular render half, then checkerboard half--but there's plenty of reason to run these paths in parallel. Thus they'd fill the same, full-size buffer.
By rendered he means going through the rendering pipeline.
That is: [vertices] are processed, converted into fragments, pixel shaders, compute shaders, shadows, transparencies and what not are processed for these pixels, which result in a final color that is the output.
That's not the pipeline for raytracing; so is raytracing not rendering? It's not the pipeline for signed distance fields; so is that approach not rendering? Your argument leads to bad conclusions. Again, what you've done is assert a narrow definition of "rendering" that doesn't cover the range of methods used to achieve the same ends, and doesn't accord with either natural sense or common usage.
Further, that entire pipeline, start to finish, has been performed for every single pixel of output--it was merely done a frame earlier for half of them. So you not only have to arbitrarily constrain the methods allowed to be "rendering", you have to also constrain the time horizon over which they're performed. This is yet more evidence that your personal definition requires some extremely fine gerrymandering to avoid ever including CBR.
Instead, you can just say that CBR renders the same number of pixels, but half of them are done in a faster but possibly less accurate way. This alternate statement has the twin benefits of being simpler and true.
By far the best and almost flawless one is the one in Horizon. The devs arranged the pixels drawn in a very smart way, thus minimizing effects artefacts and squashed colors which gave a result very close to native solution.
From what I've seen, the
Infinite Warfare CBR is also very good.