Something I've been wondering about for a while is the question of 4k potential in the next gen consoles. I'm of the mind that thinks that in order to hit a $399 price point, native 4k with an expected next gen leap in fidelity would be unlikely. However after getting Rainbow Six: Siege, I think it's MSAA reconstruction technique could be quite beneficial on consoles next gen. Being someone who is primarily a console gamer (can't run anything more complex than Source games on my laptop) I would love to see widespread use of these techniques next gen in order to prevent scaling artifacts so we don't have another gen like the last where everything has to be scaled in some way.
For those of you unaware on consoles Siege renders at a halved resolution in order to hit 60fps in the competitive mode and uses the data from a 2x MSAA sample to output at 1080p on PS4 and 900p on Xbox One. I do not have experience with the Xbox One version but on PS4 the final output is shockingly convincing, even in motion.
Example:
There is some artifacting but it's mostly only visible on high contrast edges and when there is a lot of motion. It's relatively minor and looks more reminiscent of aliasing than a more distracting aberration.
Example (around the gun):
Some of you may remember that Killzone: Shadow Fall's multiplayer mode attempting to do something similar. Guerrilla's technique used alternating lines from temporal sampling in order to reconstruct a 1080p image and I was personally not a fan of it. It didn't save enough performance in order to justify the overall loss in clarity and it was a less temporally stable image than what Siege is doing.
I'd love to get more information on methods like this and their practical application. Dictator93 pointed me to this piece by Matt Pettineo from Ready At Dawn.
https://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/2015/09/13/programmable-sample-points/
If anyone has more insight into these or similar techniques I'd like to hear about it, examples would be excellent as well. Do you agree that it would be a useful pursuit for consoles in the next generation? I think it would be, especially with a much higher resolution for the original image.