Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2017]

[Graham]

Checkerboard Rendering renders half of the pixels nativly.

Well. Sortof. There are still aspects of the render that do process at native resolution, so it's not a direct halving of cost. Depth/Stencil, object ID, and pre-pass alpha testing shader evaluation (optional) are native resolution to aid the CB reconstruction - and obviously the CB resolve / upscale itself also occurs at native res (plus and subsequent passes).
It depends on the implementation though. There are ways (and game examples) that render with properly halved processing all the way to the final upscale, with obvious reduced resolve quality.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Welcome to diminishing returns on resolution. The fact that a $400 console can keep up or best the $2500 system is telling. I welcome a real generation, a good CPU and the game mechanics that come with it.

What you meant to say is...

Welcome to different focuses and art directions by different development teams. Resolution has little to do with the differences between GTS and Forza 7. That's entirely down to what each team focused on.

Regards,
SB

 

[Jupiter]

Performance w

Well. Sortof. There are still aspects of the render that do process at native resolution, so it's not a direct halving of cost. Depth/Stencil, object ID, and pre-pass alpha testing shader evaluation (optional) are native resolution to aid the CB reconstruction - and obviously the CB resolve / upscale itself also occurs at native res (plus and subsequent passes).
It depends on the implementation though. There are ways (and game examples) that render with properly halved processing all the way to the final upscale, with obvious reduced resolve quality.

Yes, it does not halving the cost. I have tested Watch Dogs 2 many times with Checkerboard rendering and in CBR UHD I had 62fps compared to 52fps in native UHD (20% faster). If I would have used HBAO+ the difference would be a bit larger since it got ca. 80-100% faster with enabled CBR.

 

[London Geezer]

I say, let's embrace the obvious diminishing returns and checkerboard the hell out of our lives. What more could you ask for? Half the pixel cost (more or less) for practically no visual difference at normal viewing distances. Free those pixels! Give us better shadows and particles! FREE THE PIXELS!

 

[iroboto]

I say, let's embrace the obvious diminishing returns and checkerboard the hell out of our lives. What more could you ask for? Half the pixel cost (more or less) for practically no visual difference at normal viewing distances. Free those pixels! Give us better shadows and particles! FREE THE PIXELS!

I thought diminishing returns at 24K as at that resolution we have something close to 20/20 approximation or so I'm told LOL.

But I agree. Reconstruction is definitely desirable. We are getting there, there is no skirting around the fact that games taking advantage of reconstruction are coming out as the preferred configuration.

 

[Jupiter]

I do not think so. It creates additional artefacts which does not always bring advantages, which comes especially clear at 30fps. The quality of the TAA should be more important where Mass Effect Andromeda and The Division are good examples.

Sometimes a native 1620p can be better. Interlacing was not a good idea for television.

 

[Globalisateur]

I do not think so. It creates additional artefacts which does not always bring advantages, which comes especially clear at 30fps. The quality of the TAA should be more important where Mass Effect Andromeda and The Division are good examples.

Sometimes a native 1620p can be better. Interlacing was not a good idea for television.

For image quality yes. But a good looking game is more than that. Currently one of the best looking games on consoles are using good implementation (costly) of CBR: Horizon Zero dawn, GTS, Infinite Warfare, The Witcher 3 and Battlefield 1. As @iroboto put it:

...there is no skirting around the fact that games taking advantage of reconstruction are coming out as the preferred configuration.

 

[iroboto]

I do not think so. It creates additional artefacts which does not always bring advantages, which comes especially clear at 30fps. The quality of the TAA should be more important where Mass Effect Andromeda and The Division are good examples.

Sometimes a native 1620p can be better. Interlacing was not a good idea for television.

Checkerboarding is only 1 form of reconstruction. There are others, and as time goes on devs will find better algorithms with less artefacts, or the game will do a better job of covering them up. I'm not advocating for CBR. Just the idea that there are savings to be found from reconstruction. But you are right that there are certain scenarios where dynamic scaling is probably preferable. 30fps and lower resolutions is probably among them. St 60fps where the difference between 2 frames is less, reconstruction improves!

But as many allude to, having minor artefacts at 4K is difficult to see, as we approach 8K, even smaller, to the point where it gets incredibly hard to see them regardless. I'm the end reconstruction improves its value as we continue to increase in resolution. The savings will always be there but it will get perceptibly harder to see the mistakes.

 

[BRiT]

I say, let's embrace the obvious diminishing returns and checkerboard the hell out of our lives. What more could you ask for?

Everyone should go around wearing Pirate eye patches ... That cuts down half the pixels!

 

[chris1515]

Imo Anthem is the most impressive Xbox One X game and it is 2160p checkerboard rendering...

 

[London Geezer]

Everyone should go around wearing Pirate eye patches ... That cuts down half the pixels!

I prefer interlacing sunglasses, half the res but you still get a sense of 3D

 

[BRiT]

I prefer interlacing sunglasses, half the res but you still get a sense of 3D

That's so SLI (sly)!

 

[AlNom]

Moving along.

ahem.

 

[AlNom]

Well. Sortof. There are still aspects of the render that do process at native resolution, so it's not a direct halving of cost. Depth/Stencil, object ID, and pre-pass alpha testing shader evaluation (optional) are native resolution to aid the CB reconstruction - and obviously the CB resolve / upscale itself also occurs at native res (plus and subsequent passes).
It depends on the implementation though. There are ways (and game examples) that render with properly halved processing all the way to the final upscale, with obvious reduced resolve quality.

I don't suppose throwing MSAA into the mix would be of use aside from the accompanying perf hit.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I thought diminishing returns at 24K as at that resolution we have something close to 20/20 approximation or so I'm told LOL.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh

 

[Graham]

I don't suppose throwing MSAA into the mix would be of use aside from the accompanying perf hit.

You could in theory, but I'd doubt it'd gain you much visually. It would be a huge memory hit and potential add lots of complexity (very few deferred engines support MSAA after all).

You could go completely nuts and do some kind of equivalent of CB + 8x MSAA. An 8k depth/stencil/id buffer is scary big though (~240MB?)
Plus all it'd really gain you is a nice edge resolve for pixels without temporal history, which usually means pixels you have only seen for a frame. Not a huge gain I expect, plus at 4k pixels are already hilariously tiny

It's a moderately common technique to render a half res pass with 4x msaa, then upscale the result instead of downscale. I know a fair few games do half res particles in this manner (COD being one). I believe r6 siege did this for it's main render too. I'm not sure that'd be compatible with a CB main render.

I suspect there most common thing going forward will be to use CB or a close equivalent at a dynamic 2160 res, resolved into a full 4k res temporal pass (this is basically what 'temporal injection' means - where TAA occurs at a potentially higher res than the actual render).

 

[OCASM]

If you multiply out the number of cars by track by TOD settings possible, the permutations get rather large, several hundred lighting permutations.
If GTS wanted to be insanely accurate for lighting, they would adjust each car, for each TOD, for each track. Which I don't know if they did, but they most certainly are setup to do it (since everything is static). It would be a monumental amount of work to do. And perhaps this signals why there are less cars and less tracks than the traditional GT game.

A big selling point of PBR is that you don't have to do that. By using physically based values instead of eyeballing things materials look right in all kinds of lighting conditions. Scapes demonstrate this well.

 

[dobwal]

I say, let's embrace the obvious diminishing returns and checkerboard the hell out of our lives. What more could you ask for? Half the pixel cost (more or less) for practically no visual difference at normal viewing distances. Free those pixels! Give us better shadows and particles! FREE THE PIXELS!

Checkerboarding, real life example.

When I was young and broke I use to checker board my vision by wearing only one contact at a time when my supply got low to buy a few weeks before I needed to get replacements.

And even with really poor vision my brain and good eye (the one with the contact) actually did an outstanding job at compensating.

90% of clarity of 20/20 vision at half the cost.

LOL.

Disclaimer: I was afraid of possible long term consequences like getting a lazy eye or going cross eyed so I didn't feel the need to be so cheap once my career started to gain some upward momentum.

 

[zed]

Since a couple of ppl here have mentioned '20/20 vision' recently and implying its great. It is worth pointing out that in fact 20/20 vision is really crappy vision, but ppl always use the term as if it means 'perfect' vision, I can't really blame them since 20/20 sounds like 20 out of 20 i.e. 100%
I'm in my 40s and from last time I had a test at the optometrist scored 20/15 with my glasses on, (prolly 2/20 uncorrected)
from wiki

In young humans, the average visual acuity of a healthy, emmetropic eye (or ametropic eye with correction) is approximately 6/5 to 6/4, so it is inaccurate to refer to 6/6 visual acuity as "perfect" vision.

6/5 = 20/16.7, 6/4 = 20/13.3

 

[dobwal]

Since a couple of ppl here have mentioned '20/20 vision' recently and implying its great. It is worth pointing out that in fact 20/20 vision is really crappy vision, but ppl always use the term as if it means 'perfect' vision, I can't really blame them since 20/20 sounds like 20 out of 20 i.e. 100%
I'm in my 40s and from last time I had a test at the optometrist scored 20/15 with my glasses on, (prolly 2/20 uncorrected)
from wiki

6/5 = 20/16.7, 6/4 = 20/13.3

It's average visual acuity for humans. Why do you need glasses if you can see from 20 feet what most need to be with in 2 feet to see clearly? Jk