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[Equanimity]

You mean it will render @ 1800p and not checker board? That would be interesting.

Checkerboard rendering is used to reach 4K from native 1800p.

 

[pottuvoi]

Well, it's not really good as it's a decimal downsampling which will produce stair case artifacting without a good blur filter - at which point it may turn out that said blur filter alone would be just as good.

If I was to use PS4Pro's h/w for downsampling to 1080p I'd render in 1920x2160 and downsample from that in a 1x2 fashion. That would at least give a nice integer scaling with two clear subsamples per screen pixel.

But I'm betting that Sony will just downscale the actual reconstructed 4K output to 1080p and call that downsampling instead. Meaning that PS4Pro will likely show reconstruction artifacts in 1080p as well as in 4K.

This.

It certainly would have the best quality for cost if checkerboard is used.

Checkerboard rendering is used to reach 4K from native 1800p.

Pretty sure you mean native 1980p x2.

Checkerboad needs to render half of the pixels each frame, so something like 1980x2160 buffer is needed for 4k.
Although I'm quite sure that 2x MSAA buffer is commonly used as it's sample pattern is natural fit.

 

[Ozorov]

I'm thinking about order a Samsung 850-Series EVO 1TB for the Pro. Is there something I need to know before ordering? Anything more I need or is there some better option?

 

[televator]

Checkerboard rendering is used to reach 4K from native 1800p.

Yes? That's not really the convo I'm on... I wanna know about downsampling.

 

[2blackcats]

Both the British and Japanese official spec pages say 100v, not sure what that means (the site is wrong?)

Well if the British site says 100v, it's got to be wrong. Seems crazy that the official source would have such a big mistake and left there for so long too.

At least it gives me hope I can import no problem.

Thanks for reply.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/ps4/tech-specs/

 

[Cthulhu_Steev]

Yes? That's not really the convo I'm on... I wanna know about downsampling.

It should downsample from 1800p to 1080p, I can't believe it would checkerboard up to 4K then back down again, because that makes no sense.

 

[Omnistalgic]

yeah, like i said, old games or non demanding indies, when they shout "4K" from the rooftops it sounds they should put a big asterisk before people start to expect big modern AAA titles at 4K

Yeah but if games are getting so close that the difference is not even apparent, especially by non technically minded gamers, they should be screaming 4K from the rooftops. That's the whole point of all the software techniques, and hitting the price point of $400. If not they would be waiting until next year like MS.

The end result is what matters, and we have press saying how close it is to 4K, how much better it looks than 1080p, and you have sports titles hitting native. I don't see what the problem is, most gamers don't even notice the difference between PS4 & X1.

 

[televator]

It should downsample from 1800p to 1080p, I can't believe it would checkerboard up to 4K then back down again, because that makes no sense.

Right, that's what I'm told by another poster earlier. It's not a concrete fact, but it's plausible.

 

[Hexa]

Checkerboard rendering as far as we have evidence of doesn't increase resolution in a straight up manner. Like saying that you can use cb to get from 1800p to 2160p doesn't make much sense. 1800p is the resolution obtained with cb, which is then upscaled to 4K or down sampled to 1080p. We had an argument about this relating to Killing Floor 2 and Digital Foundry confirmed that that's what was happening.

 

[dr_rus]

It should downsample from 1800p to 1080p, I can't believe it would checkerboard up to 4K then back down again, because that makes no sense.

That makes perfect sense as it:
a. Provides a uniform approach to rendering in 1080p cases (downsample whatever the game outputs to 4K)
b. Gives a nice 2x2 subpixel grid which can be easily downsampled to one pixel without any additional filters.

What doesn't make sense is the downsampling from 1800p since there's no guarantee that a game will even render in that. If a game will use checkerboarding there won't be any 1800p to downsample from as checkerboarding frame buffer is actually 4K with temporal accumulation between frames.

If a game will actually use 1800p with upscaling to 4K then downscaling to 1080p from 1800p would result in lots of blur and/or stair case artifacts since you'll have an uneven subpixel grid in this case with several subpixels belonging to several screen pixels at once. In this case it may be better to just render in 1080p if said game won't implement 2x1 or 1x2 supersampling specifically for 1080p mode.

 

[Lord Error]

It should downsample from 1800p to 1080p, I can't believe it would checkerboard up to 4K then back down again, because that makes no sense.

It might make sense. Checkerboard rendering is not simple upscaling. The quality of the checkerboarded final output is better looking than just original resolution stretched to 4K. therefore, supersampling from checkerboarded 4K should look better than supersampling from 1800p. I don't know if it would make enough visible difference to be worth the performance/reseource hit however.

Checkerboard rendering as far as we have evidence of doesn't increase resolution in a straight up manner. Like saying that you can use cb to get from 1800p to 2160p doesn't make much sense. 1800p is the resolution obtained with cb, which is then upscaled to 4K or down sampled to 1080p. We had an argument about this relating to Killing Floor 2 and Digital Foundry confirmed that that's what was happening.

Interesting, but I don't believe that is the case. If it is the case, what would the starting buffer resolution be? 900p (x2)? Even then, that could be an example of just one game.

 

[vpance]

Checkerboard rendering is used to reach 4K from native 1800p.

I think they are checkerboarding to 1800p using 900p x 2.

 

[Hexa]

Resolution doesn't scale like that because when you write 1800p, you're referring to only the height.
So to find an approximation of what a resolution of the rendered pixels would be before cb for standard aspect ratio:
((16/9)*p)*p)/2=((16/9)*x)*x)
Where p is the resolution after cb and x is input into cb.
This simplifies to: x=sqrt((p^2)/2)
So for 1800p after cb it would be approximately 1273p input.
For 4k which is 2160p it would be 1527p.
Let me emphasize however that this is a pretty strange way of looking at it since the display buffer for the input into cb is the same as the output, however in terms of processing power being used and the pixels natively sampled this is a good approximation.

 

[onQ123]

Checkerboard rendering as far as we have evidence of doesn't increase resolution in a straight up manner. Like saying that you can use cb to get from 1800p to 2160p doesn't make much sense. 1800p is the resolution obtained with cb, which is then upscaled to 4K or down sampled to 1080p. We had an argument about this relating to Killing Floor 2 and Digital Foundry confirmed that that's what was happening.

Checkerboard rendering is parallel rendering it can be done with 2 GPUs or it can be done with one GPU but using 2 or more different processes for the rendering & in this case half is being rendered in the traditional way while the other half is being done be re rendering pixels from the frame that came before using data from the ID buffer & whatever.

 

[Hexa]

Checkerboard rendering is parallel rendering it can be done with 2 GPUs or it can be done with one GPU but using 2 or more different processes for the rendering & in this case half is being rendered in the traditional way while the other half is being done be re rendering pixels from the frame that came before using data from the ID buffer & whatever.

By straight up I meant that cb itself doesn't increase resolution. It uses less power for the same resolution, and hence you can hit a higher resolution, but it doesn't increase the resolution straight up like upscaling, which is how the term was being used.
Also doing it entirely in parallel with natively rendering the frame is probably a bad idea. You need to have the grid from what's rendered natively to better determine the motion vectors and how or even whether to use the previous frame or simply upscale. The reconstructive portion is small enough compared to the native rendering so that shouldn't be an issue AFAIK.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Checkerboard rendering is not a scaling technique. There is no different intermediate resolution to downsample from instead of the full 4K frame. Any artifacts will be smaller then a single pixel when downsampled to 1080p.

 

[Elios83]

Resolution doesn't scale like that because when you write 1800p, you're referring to only the height.
So to find an approximation of what a resolution of the rendered pixels would be before cb for standard aspect ratio:
((16/9)*p)*p)/2=((16/9)*x)*x)
Where p is the resolution after cb and x is input into cb.
This simplifies to: x=sqrt((p^2)/2)
So for 1800p after cb it would be approximately 1273p input.
For 4k which is 2160p it would be 1527p.
Let me emphasize however that this is a pretty strange way of looking at it since the display buffer for the input into cb is the same as the output, however in terms of processing power being used and the pixels natively sampled this is a good approximation.

Indeed if I understand correctly when they talk about 1800p or 2160p with checkerboard rendering they simply mean that the resolution they're actually rendering at is the same vertical resolution but with half the horizontal resolution so something like 1800*1600 and 2160*1920 for total pixels.
With interpolation and other reconstruction techniques then they reconstruct the full resolution picture that still needs to be upscaled traditionally to 2160p if they're using anything below 2160p checkerboarded.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[onQ123]

By straight up I meant that cb itself doesn't increase resolution. It uses less power for the same resolution, and hence you can hit a higher resolution, but it doesn't increase the resolution straight up like upscaling, which is how the term was being used.
Also doing it entirely in parallel with natively rendering the frame is probably a bad idea. You need to have the grid from what's rendered natively to better determine the motion vectors and how or even whether to use the previous frame or simply upscale. The reconstructive portion is small enough compared to the native rendering so that shouldn't be an issue AFAIK.

I know I was adding on to what you was saying about it not increasing the resolution from a lower resolution.

 

[televator]

Checkerboard rendering is not a scaling technique. There is no different intermediate resolution to downsample from instead of the full 4K frame. Any artifacts will be smaller then a single pixel when downsampled to 1080p.

I see... this is getting more interesting. I wonder if this could make for a lighter version of downsampling that is obtainable on more mid level PC hardware. Honestly, I find the application of this tech for the porposes of AA more interesting than for straight up pseudo full res interpolation.

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

There seems to be a lot of mixed messaging in the last few pages.

I thought the whole purpose of checkerboard rendering that's being handled is to reconstruct a 4k image from a lower resolution sample, with the end result being displayed, a 4k equal pixel count final image.

With the hardware checkerboarding in the Pro, Sony seems to be heavily encouraging 3200x1800 as a good base resolution to reconstruct the 4K final image, though devs seem to be free to chose other resolutions, but people are talking up about checkerboarding to 1800p and upscaling it? Wouldn't just upscaling at this point just still result in that base resolution count defeating the purpose of 4k reconstruction?

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

When the 30fps lock is enabled in the PS4 TLOU remaster, it suffers significant latency compared to the 60fps mode. Do we know that if Pro's 4K 30fps mode will suffer the same fate? Aiming is so much easier in the 60fps mode as a result.

Naughty Dog promised that the 60 FPS mode of TLOU:R (running at high resolution in checkerboard) on PS4 PRO will be more stable than the 60 FPS mode on regular PS4. I bet the native 4K 30 FPS mode will be treated in the same way.

 

[dogen]

There seems to be a lot of mixed messaging in the last few pages.

I thought the whole purpose of checkerboard rendering that's being handled is to reconstruct a 4k image from a lower resolution sample, with the end result being displayed, a 4k equal pixel count final image.

With the hardware checkerboarding in the Pro, Sony seems to be heavily encouraging 3200x1800 as a good base resolution to reconstruct the 4K final image, though devs seem to be free to chose other resolutions, but people are talking up about checkerboarding to 1800p and upscaling it? Wouldn't just upscaling at this point just still result in that base resolution count defeating the purpose of 4k reconstruction?

You can't use checkerboard to reconstruct 4k from 3200x1800.

 

[onQ123]

There seems to be a lot of mixed messaging in the last few pages.

I thought the whole purpose of checkerboard rendering that's being handled is to reconstruct a 4k image from a lower resolution sample, with the end result being displayed, a 4k equal pixel count final image.

With the hardware checkerboarding in the Pro, Sony seems to be heavily encouraging 3200x1800 as a good base resolution to reconstruct the 4K final image, though devs seem to be free to chose other resolutions, but people are talking up about checkerboarding to 1800p and upscaling it? Wouldn't just upscaling at this point just still result in that base resolution count defeating the purpose of 4k reconstruction?

There isn't a hardware checkerboarding but there is hardware that make the job of checkerboard rendering easier. also 3200x1800 would be the result of checkerboard rendering & not the resolution that you use to checkerboard render from,

The reason for using 1800p instead of 4K in some situations is that you're not always going to have enough GPU power to do 2X 1080P as your base & still have enough processing power left over for the checkerboard rendering process.

 

[Elios83]

There seems to be a lot of mixed messaging in the last few pages.

I thought the whole purpose of checkerboard rendering that's being handled is to reconstruct a 4k image from a lower resolution sample, with the end result being displayed, a 4k equal pixel count final image.

With the hardware checkerboarding in the Pro, Sony seems to be heavily encouraging 3200x1800 as a good base resolution to reconstruct the 4K final image, though devs seem to be free to chose other resolutions, but people are talking up about checkerboarding to 1800p and upscaling it? Wouldn't just upscaling at this point just still result in that base resolution count defeating the purpose of 4k reconstruction?

No checkerboard rendering simply means that pixels are rendered on a checkerboard pattern so that basically you can consider either the vertical or the horizontal resolution as if it was slashed by a factor of 2 when you calculate the total number of pixels actually rendered.
1800p checkeboard doesn't mean a fully rendered 3200*1800 image then upscaled in some special way to 2160p.
It means that they're rendering 1800*1600 pixels on a checkerboard pattern, then they are using spatial and temporal reconstruction techniques to produce a 1800*3200 image but then this image still needs to be upscaled to 2160p.
Ideally you'd want to render at 2160p checkerboard so that after the reconstruction you end up with the final image without an other upscaling pass but unfortunately it seems that for a few games even 2160p checkerboarded is too demanding, let alone native 2160p.
But about your last question the point is that using checkerboard reconstruction you still get a more natural and pleasing image to the eye compared to rendering at whatever equivalent native resolution they're actually using and then brutally upscale to 4K.
Also traditional upscaling to 2160p is particularly effective when you have a 1800p image as a basis so that's why they want to end up with a 1800p image anyway before upscaling if necessary in a few games.

This is at least as far as I'm understanding things.

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

There isn't a hardware checkerboarding but there is hardware that make the job of checkerboard rendering easier. also 3200x1800 would be the result of checkerboard rendering & not the resolution that you use to checkerboard render from,

The reason for using 1800p instead of 4K in some situations is that you're not always going to have enough GPU power to do 2X 1080P as your base & still have enough processing power left over for the checkerboard rendering process.

I think the only game we know that it checkerboards 2 X 1080p is Horizon, that is why all its screens look very crisp.

 

[onQ123]

I think the only game we know that it checkerboards 2 X 1080p is Horizon, that is why all its screens look very crisp.

Days Gone, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn

Uncharted 4 is undergoing retooling ("they're taking another look at rendering strategies," says Cerny) but of the 13 games revealed, nine used checkerboarding. Days Gone, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn all render up to 2160p with checkerboarding, super-sampling down to 1080p on full HD displays, while the Lara Croft title has multiple modes with explicit 1080p support. Mark Cerny is keen to point out that developers are free to use the checkerboarding tech as they see fit, so we will see many different variations and interpretations.

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

Days Gone, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn

Ah nice. I forgot about those games. Sure those games looked very crisp in screens. No wonder you can match native 4K resolution when the camera is till and you don't move. Those games will have the best screenshot IQ among the other games (unless the game is native 4K from the start).

Edit: Now that I think of: why Isn't Infamous First Light checkerboard 1080p X2 like those games and just 1800p? I don't think Infamous First Light is more demanding than Horizon and Days Gone which are both open world and have newer techs and engines. Is it maybe because it is adding more effects like extra particle effects + the higher resolution while most of the other games settled for the same game without increased graphical fidelity besides the higher resolution?

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

You can't use checkerboard to reconstruct 4k from 3200x1800.

There isn't a hardware checkerboarding but there is hardware that make the job of checkerboard rendering easier. also 3200x1800 would be the result of checkerboard rendering & not the resolution that you use to checkerboard render from,

The reason for using 1800p instead of 4K in some situations is that you're not always going to have enough GPU power to do 2X 1080P as your base & still have enough processing power left over for the checkerboard rendering process.

No checkerboard rendering simply means that pixels are rendered on a checkerboard pattern so that basically you can consider either the vertical or the horizontal resolution as if it was slashed by a factor of 2 when you calculate the total number of pixels actually rendered.
1800p checkeboard doesn't mean a fully rendered 3200*1800 image then upscaled in some special way to 2160p.
It means that they're rendering 1800*1600 pixels on a checkerboard pattern, then they are using spatial and temporal reconstruction techniques to produce a 1800*3200 image but then this image still needs to be upscaled to 2160p.
Ideally you'd want to render at 2160p checkerboard so that after the reconstruction you end up with the final image without an other upscaling pass but unfortunately it seems that for a few games even 2160p checkerboarded is too demanding, let alone native 2160p.
But about your last question the point is that using checkerboard reconstruction you still get a more natural and pleasing image to the eye compared to rendering at whatever equivalent native resolution they're actually using and then brutally upscale to 4K.
Also traditional upscaling to 2160p is particularly effective when you have a 1800p image as a basis so that's why they want to end up with a 1800p image anyway before upscaling if necessary in a few games.

This is at least as far as I'm understanding things.

Thank you guys for the info. Somewhat makes it clearer understand for my thick skull.

 

[Elios83]

I think the only game we know that it checkerboards 2 X 1080p is Horizon, that is why all its screens look very crisp.

There are more than that including COD and Tomb Raider.
Basically the whole spectrum of possibilities is being covered depending on the game.
We go from enhanced 1080p graphics brutally upscaled at 4K ( Paragon) to native 2160p titles (TLOU, Skyrim, NBA, PES). In between we have 1800p checkerboard, 2160p checkerboard.
But there are also other approaches like traditional dynamic resolution (Deus Ex) and other proprietary alternatives to checkerboard rendering that Ubisoft and Insomniac are using and they believe produce better results.
It's also interesting that Cerny mentioned that Naughy Dog changed their rendering method for Uncharted 4 on the Pro recently to something that for them gives better results, although no further details have been given.

 

[Sam Bishop]

I'm thinking about order a Samsung 850-Series EVO 1TB for the Pro. Is there something I need to know before ordering? Anything more I need or is there some better option?

PS4 doesn't support TRIM, and the OS is constantly writing to the drive because of video capture. The performance gains (even with SATA III) aren't really worth sapping those read/write limits if you plan on keeping the hard drive in there for the life of the system (though, honestly, 2TB drives may get cheap fast enough that it's not a huge deal). Given the encryption bottleneck in place because of the hypervisor, I wouldn't bother with an SSD, as the gains, while perceptible, aren't a good equal tradeoff for the fact that that drive is going to burn through those read/write limits rather quickly.

 

[dano1]

Cerny. I think this thread needs you!!

 

[Arttemis]

I really want a brand other than Seagate to release a 2TB drive. My Seagate from the Backup Plus Slim emits a high pitch chirping that sounds like a series of beeps every 15-90 seconds.

 

[onQ123]

There are more than that including COD and Tomb Raider.
Basically the whole spectrum of possibilities is being covered depending on the game.
We go from enhanced 1080p graphics brutally upscaled at 4K ( Paragon) to native 2160p titles (TLOU, Skyrim, NBA, PES). In between we have 1800p checkerboard, 2160p checkerboard.
But there are also other approaches like traditional dynamic resolution (Deus Ex) and other proprietary alternatives to checkerboard rendering that Ubisoft and Insomniac are using and they believe produce better results.
It's also interesting that Cerny mentioned that Naughy Dog changed their rendering method for Uncharted 4 on the Pro recently to something that for them gives better results, although no further details have been given.

I'm waiting for devs to use the new hardware for new rendering techniques that don't have anything to do with the resolution, I'm thinking that if the ID buffer is able to track polygons in 3D space devs should be able to use that information for better lighting & so on.

 

[potatohead]

Yeah but if games are getting so close that the difference is not even apparent, especially by non technically minded gamers, they should be screaming 4K from the rooftops. That's the whole point of all the software techniques, and hitting the price point of $400. If not they would be waiting until next year like MS.

The end result is what matters, and we have press saying how close it is to 4K, how much better it looks than 1080p, and you have sports titles hitting native. I don't see what the problem is, most gamers don't even notice the difference between PS4 & X1.

This.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Cerny. I think this thread needs you!!

Yeah, i'm getting confused, what the heck

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

I'm waiting for devs to use the new hardware for new rendering techniques that don't have anything to do with the resolution, I'm thinking that if the ID buffer is able to track polygons in 3D space devs should be able to use that information for better lighting & so on.

The added primitive discard accelerator may help more by culling triangles from the scene that aren't visible. Devs should take advantage of all the new hardware additions. Sadly the games released this year won't take full advantage of the PS4 PRO full capabilities since the devs didn't get much notice about the console before its reveal.

 

[pottuvoi]

Ah nice. I forgot about those games. Sure those games looked very crisp in screens. No wonder you can match native 4K resolution when the camera is till and you don't move. Those games will have the best screenshot IQ among the other games (unless the game is native 4K from the start).

Edit: Now that I think of: why Isn't Infamous First Light checkerboard 1080p X2 like those games and just 1800p? I don't think Infamous First Light is more demanding than Horizon and Days Gone which are both open world and have newer techs and engines. Is it maybe because it is adding more effects like extra particle effects + the higher resolution while most of the other games settled for the same game without increased graphical fidelity besides the higher resolution?

Infamous uses the 'geometry rendering' aka. MSAA trick.

Basically render 1080p buffer with 4xMSAA and ordered sample pattern, resolve result to 4k buffer.
This gets perfect edges and shading rate similar to 1080p.

As it has optional 30fps lock, I would expect it to get close to 60fps without it.

The added primitive discard accelerator may help more by culling triangles from the scene that aren't visible. Devs should take advantage of all the new hardware additions. Sadly the games released this year won't take full advantage of the PS4 PRO full capabilities since the devs didn't get much notice about the console before its reveal.

There is good change that the discard accelerator is automatic, meaning developer doesn't have to write a line of code to get advantage.

Certainly will be interesting to see how developers will use all the possibilities that new options will give them. (ID buffer should help a lot in case of TAA methods, we should see less trailing artifacts in future.)

 

[Planet]

the OS is constantly writing to the drive because of video capture.

AFAIK it doesn't. The captured video is stored in RAM only until you press that share button.

 

[Astrates]

Yes.

But that in mind even older SDDs won't make use of SATA3 because it can even reach SATA2 peak.

Only SSDs over 300MB/s will use SATA3 advantage.

Fair enough, to be honest, after looking at prices I'll probably stick to a mechanical drive due to prices, just looking for a bit more space.

 

[dr_rus]

Checkerboard rendering is parallel rendering it can be done with 2 GPUs or it can be done with one GPU but using 2 or more different processes for the rendering & in this case half is being rendered in the traditional way while the other half is being done be re rendering pixels from the frame that came before using data from the ID buffer & whatever.

There's nothing parallel about temporal accumulation.

Checkerboard rendering is not a scaling technique. There is no different intermediate resolution to downsample from instead of the full 4K frame. Any artifacts will be smaller then a single pixel when downsampled to 1080p.

They won't be smaller than a single pixel, they will be precisely single pixel since checkerboard quads will be downscaled to one screen pixel. This may result in some shimmering / aliasing leading to such downsampling being somewhat less effective than you'd expect from it based on PC DSR/VSR implementations.

 

[onQ123]

There's nothing parallel about temporal accumulation.

The rerendering of the data from the previous frame is happening in parallel with the rendering of the other half of the frame.

 

[viHuGi]

No Uncharted 4 patch for launch makes me sad, would love a 1080p Ultra mode with better shadows and some other tweaks, game is already insanely beautiful!

 

[pottuvoi]

The rerendering of the data from the previous frame is happening in parallel with the rendering of the other half of the frame.

Nope, there is no 'rerendering' of previous frame, you 'just' reuse previously rendered data,

Most likely it happens in a way similar to the following.

You render to buffer 1
Reconstruction pass in which combines 1&2 for output buffer.
you render to buffer 2
Reconstruction pass in which combines 1&2 for output buffer.
You render to buffer 1
Reconstruction pass in which combines 1&2 for output buffer.
etc..

GPUs really do not like interleaved patterns, so you render non-interleaved buffer and combine the results.
Of course there is possibility to have more buffers to get better history & TAA.

 

[onQ123]

Nope, there is no 'rerendering' of previous frame, you 'just' reuse previously rendered data,

Most likely it happens in a way similar to the following.

You render to buffer 1
Reconstruction pass in which combines 1&2 for output buffer.
you render to buffer 2
Reconstruction pass in which combines 1&2 for output buffer.
You render to buffer 1
Reconstruction pass in which combines 1&2 for output buffer.
etc..

GPUs really do not like interleaved patterns, so you render non-interleaved buffer and combine the results.
Of course there is possibility to have more buffers to get better history & TAA.

They are re rendering the pixels using the ID buffer it's not just them taking the pixel from before & leaving it on the screen

"First, we can do the same ID-based colour propagation that we did for geometry rendering, so we can get some excellent spatial anti-aliasing before we even get into temporal, even without paying attention to the previous frame, we can create images of a higher quality than if our 4m colour samples were arranged in a rectangular grid... In other words, image quality is immediately better than 1530p," Cerny explains earnestly.

"Second, we can use the colours and the IDs from the previous frame, which is to say that we can do some pretty darn good temporal anti-aliasing. Clearly if the camera isn't moving we can insert the previous frame's colours and essentially get perfect 4K imagery. But even if the camera is moving or parts of the scene are moving, we can use the IDs - both object ID and triangle ID to hunt for an appropriate part of the previous frame and use that. So the IDs give us some certainty about how to use the previous frame. "

 

[pottuvoi]

They are re rendering the pixels using the ID buffer it's not just them taking the pixel from before & leaving it on the screen

Sounds a lot like they 'fill blanks' with really simple shader, not render anything using ROPs.
This could be part of the combination pass.

Although in theory they could render full resolution ID buffer every frame, would give perfect edges every frame.

Will be interesting to see the implementation details someday.

 

[viHuGi]

With all this talk of Ps4 Pro having stuff Post Polaris i have a question:

Is this more powerful than a RX 480 ?

i´m asking this because i have a friend between getting a RX 480 or a PS4 Pro so he wants to know wich will last longer.

 

[LelouchZero]

With all this talk of Ps4 Pro having stuff Post Polaris i have a question:

Is this more powerful than a RX 480 ?

i´m asking this because i have a friend between getting a RX 480 or a PS4 Pro so he wants to know wich will last longer.

The RX 480 is more powerful, however should the PS4 Pro's GPU enhancements get utilized and provide sizable performance improvements it will certainly come closer in performance to it, the RX 480 does have a full 8GB of ram and more bandwidth at it's disposal though, this is a strong advantage over the 218GB/s unified ram setup of the PS4 Pro. The RX 480 will be able to deliver higher quality textures as a result of this.

If your friend desires a gaming experience which pursues higher frame-rates in-comparison to the PS4 and PS4 Pro the RX 480 coupled with a powerful CPU would be the way to go, however if they desire image quality improvements over performance then the PS4 Pro is an incredibly attractive option due to it's enhancements which makes running higher resolutions more feasible and less resource intensive in-comparison to the PC setup.

For example, in the pursuit of higher frame-rates such as 60 fps at resolutions such as 1080p the RX 480 is the way to go.

It's an interesting state of affairs, as this console's GPU power is a lot more competitive to comparable PC hardware in comparison to the standard PS4 when it launched. People aren't very fond of the term "secret sauce" but in this situation this console truly does have "secret sauce" which are primary utilized to improve the image quality instead of higher frame-rates.

However, we can't say for certain what advantages the RX 480 will have over the PS4 Pro and vice versa until the system actually launches and we have multi-platform titles to look at and compare across PC and Consoles.

 

[dr_rus]

The rerendering of the data from the previous frame is happening in parallel with the rendering of the other half of the frame.

All rendering is happening in parallel unless we're talking about a rendering process requiring specific order. With temporal accumulation you're using previous frame data for parts of the current frame, so this is the process which can't be happening in parallel since you have to render the previous frame before you will be able to use this data in the current one.

And this filling of blanks is unlikely to happen in parallel to the actual rendering of current frame quads either as you most likely need the current frame data to perform proper temporal reconstruction of missing parts using the previous frame data.

So you have:
A. Render 1st frame checkerboard of odd quads
B. Render 2nd frame checkerboard of even quads
C. Combine 2nd frame with 1st one adjusting the 1st one by motion vectors / ID buffer / whatever
D. Present
E. Render 3rd frame checkerboard of odd quads
F. Combine 3rd frame with 2nd one adjusting the 2nd one by bla bla bla
G. Present
H. Etc.

This isn't parallel at all.

And ID buffer doesn't really sound like something new, geometry ids like this are typical on TBDRs and I'm pretty sure that NV is using them in Maxwell+ for their TBIR approach - and this is quite probably the basis for MFAA they have in Maxwell+. It should help with temporal accumulation for sure but it's not magic, and there's certainly no "re-rendering" of pixels since the whole idea of checkerboarding rendering is in splitting the rendering between two frames since PS4Pro isn't powerful enough to handle 4K rendering in one frame.

 

[viHuGi]

The RX 480 is more powerful, however should the PS4 Pro's GPU enhancements get utilized and provide sizable performance improvements it will certainly come closer in performance to it, the RX 480 does have a full 8GB of ram and more bandwidth at it's disposal though, this is a strong advantage over the 218GB/s unified ram setup of the PS4 Pro. The RX 480 will be able to deliver higher quality textures as a result of this.

If your friend desires a gaming experience which pursues higher frame-rates in-comparison to the PS4 and PS4 Pro the RX 480 coupled with a powerful CPU would be the way to go, however if they desire image quality improvements over performance then the PS4 Pro is an incredibly attractive option due to it's enhancements which makes running higher resolutions more feasible and less resource intensive in-comparison to the PC setup.

For example, in the pursuit of higher frame-rates such as 60 fps at resolutions such as 1080p the RX 480 is the way to go.

It's an interesting state of affairs, as this console's GPU power is a lot more competitive to comparable PC hardware in comparison to the standard PS4 when it launched. People aren't very fond of the term "secret sauce" but in this situation this console truly does have "secret sauce" which are primary utilized to improve the image quality instead of higher frame-rates.

However, we can't say for certain what advantages the RX 480 will have over the PS4 Pro and vice versa until the system actually launches and we have multi-platform titles to look at and compare across PC and Consoles.

Copying and pasting to him, thank you very much mate.

 

[Salz01]

No Uncharted 4 patch for launch makes me sad, would love a 1080p Ultra mode with better shadows and some other tweaks, game is already insanely beautiful!

Oh I guess I missed something, was this confirmed already. Sad if true.