GamingBolt always brings us the most intriguing and controversial interviews and today was no different. The website sat down with Mark Williams, the technical director at VooFoo Studios who worked on Mantis Burn Racing. GamingBolt asked him to compare Sony’s checkerboard rendering technique to achieve upscaled 4K visuals and Microsoft’s native 4K visuals promised on the Xbox Scorpio. What Williams said will shock you. He clarified:
“Checkerboard rendering is a neat approach to achieving 4K when you don’t have the performance to do it natively, but it requires more work from a development perspective, and it can be tricky to make it look right. It’s never going to look as good as full 4K, though on relatively static scenes it can get close. In Mantis Burn Racing where everything on screen is moving by pretty fast, you’d see much less definition in the pixel detail than at full 4K. If the screen is changing much less per frame, then you can do temporal reprojection between frames to fill in the detail that you miss with checkerboard.”
There you have it. Over the past few weeks, particularly on NeoGAF, I’ve heard “anonymous” developers say how you can’t tell the difference between native 4K and upscaled 4K. That’s a lie. You can. I’ve seen games on PlayStation 4 Pro and they’re noticeably blurry when compared to a native 4K presentation. A good example of this would be Mantis Burn Racing, a great little indie game, which runs at native 4K on PlayStation 4 Pro. The clarity of visuals it offers when compared to a title like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on PlayStation 4 Pro or even a first-party game like Horizon: Zero Dawn is evident, especially when you’re playing and seeing objects in motion. Skyrim: Special Edition also runs at native 4K on PlayStation 4 Pro, despite suffering from low-resolution textures on all versions. It also offers superior clarity when compared to upscaled games on PlayStation 4 Pro. VooFoo Studios’ Mark Williams nailed it when he mentioned that. I’m glad there are developers who are telling gamers the truth and how big of an advantage Xbox Scorpio’s native 4K games will have when it comes to image clarity and pixel quality especially in motion. I would love to see what the “anonymous” developers have to say now.
Source: GamingBolt
Xian was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 162 articles across game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.