No.
Upscaling is free, and so is downscaling.
1800p can be outputted to 4K or 1080p with no performance difference.
See: every game you can output to 720p.
Upscaling may be free in the traditional sense, but if you approximate pixels like you do in checkerboarding, it's certainly not, well if you consider checkerboarding scaling anyway......
One thing I realize you are focused on is the scaling, but be aware I'm telling you that
downsampling is not free, I'm speaking of the entire process, not just the scaling.
Obviously, downsampling in-engine on a game to game basis incurs a GPU pull that has to be catered for in advance, hence why you don't see the penalty in the faceoff. The penalty is already incurred prior to the scaling.
Consoles are still not directly PC's, console ram/cpu and gpu are all linked on one pipeline and share similar bandwidth, doing downsampling in-engine per game is not as free as you're thinking. I'm inclined to believe a better solution is imminent on an OS or firmware level, who knows, perhaps the checkerboard hardware in the pro will assist with the implementation of a universal downsampling feature on the console.
Having said that, I'm not denying or suggesting that ND will not bring back supersampling in-engine, they're may very well be working on that, but I imagine they would have to do further optimizations in order to prevent reversion to 1800p framerates prior to this patch.....Hey, a very valid reason why a supersampling patch is not out yet.
Please stop. Show me the receipts. So you saying that performance in 1800p mode for 4K display users was improved by removing an option from 1080p display users? LOL. They probably just tweaked resolution of alpha effects or something similar to that and performance came back to OG PS4 levels.
Are you serious? You ask for receipts, when it is a known fact that downsampling is not free. NOTE: I've been using the term downsampling in every post I've made.
Stranger still, you ask for receipts and yet you are the one suggesting that the resolution of alpha was tweaked to net us a 5-10fps increase in 1800p mode...So I'd love to see a video demonstration of those worsened alpha effects. You are actually suggesting that the game was downgraded in the latest patch. I wonder where these tales are coming from.
Also, performance at 1800p is not at OG PS4 levels, it's better than OG PS4 levels.....