Prices of 4K 60fps PC Gaming System?

[Blazkowicz]

PS4 Pro games use checkerboard rendering to achieve 4k resolution whilst actually rendering sub-4k (close to usually, depending on title). PC will always render at the specified resolution.

Whether Forza @ 4k60 on Scorpio is using a similar rendering system or not I have no idea. Since there's a whole lot of horsepower in the scorpio, it may well be rendering at full 4k.

Why not use checkerboard rendering on PC then?, that'd be useful.
In fact, using a 1920x2160 rendering resolution with horizontal pixel doubling would be a useful option (as long as you don't use Microsoft Cleartype to render fonts in your game), well I imagine so.
Ages ago you could run Duke 3D in 320x400, although it was the one mode that had an issue with VESA 1.2 vs VESA 2.0 and was hard to get running. But if it ran it looked great while being very fast. Although maybe a raycaster engine benefited especially from vertical resolution.

So, if fake 4K is actually useful (esp. if you have high ppi) I hope the PC will eventually do it.

Otherwise I think what are missing on the PC are 4K high refresh displays. Also, on PC you have more freedom in what hardware you run and there could be 3200x1800 desktop monitors for a very high res but with much fewer pixels to render (30% less). Vendors don't seem yet interested though.

 

[Malo]

Why not use checkerboard rendering on PC then?, that'd be useful.

Likely because resolution issues have always generally been solved by throwing better hardware at it and that's the way it's always been. You don't get that option on consoles so finding all these ways to "cheat" is more of a focus on console. Besides, PC gamers are fickle elitists so there better be an option to turn it off Rendering resolution scaling has been something finding it's way into more games and that is similar to checkerboard minus the temporal aspect I believe?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Doom had "low detail" and "high detail" that you could toggle with F5 if you wanted to. I think it halves your rendering (render a vertical scan line, then draw it twice instead of rendering two scan lines)
I guess someone could patch doom 2 so that the rendered scan line flickers between the left one and the right one. Might be horrible.
But if consoles do that with a bit of processing (post-processing is amazingly cheap compared to the rest of what the game does) and the res is 10x bigger on both axis than doom (over 100x bigger. really) then that might be better.
What I wonder about is whether you'd better need a locked 60fps. It's hard to fully understand about that checkerboard rendering.

 

[xEx]

With ryzen and the new VGAs that are coming out the prices for PC will drop. Although I still don't find 4k appealing...I would prefer to spend into a 1080p (real...)HDR instead of a 4kSDR display and the performance handicap of render in HDR is much lower than render at 4k so less performance impact and much much better quality. Of course we enter the problem that...well there isn't really any HDR displays out there for costumers just 5k TVs and 3.5k displays that don't even fully support it.

Either way this is a threat for scorpio vs pc and as it always has been in the first year or two the console will be cheaper but then the PC will catch up and will offer better quality for the same price. And Vega will play a big part of this since its HBC seems to be a real redefiner in how texture are store and read but its all marketing right now so we will have to wait for real numbers before talk about it.