Native Approach is Better for Visual Quality Than Checkerboard, Says Bluepoint

One of the techniques that developers often use on the PS4 Pro, and even the Xbox One X, to achieve image output in 4K, is checkerboarding, which is a special form of upscaling that delivers visually pretty great image quality.

However, according to Bluepoint, the remastering and remake folks, who recently released a full fledged remake of Shadow of the Colossus on PS4, there is a better way to achieve much better IQ on PS4 Pro than that. Speaking with Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, Bluepoint’s President and Co-Owner Marco Thrush discussed the technique of using a native 1440p image, and then injecting it into a 4K buffer using temporal injection.

“We’re doing exactly what Ratchet and Clank is doing, which is actually rendering a native 1440p frame and injecting it temporarily into a 4K buffer, so the actual final output that we’re sending to the hardware with the UI and stuff is 4K and really just calling it 1440p is kind of lying a little bit, because over time the temporal jittering of the rendering will give you a higher-quality result than a single 1440p frame,” he said.

“In addition to the temporal jittering at the injection into the 4K buffer, we also have standard temporal AA. So that’s what we’re using, but yeah, we’re not doing anything like checkerboard rendering, we’re just doing the native approach, which simplifies things a lot actually.”

Of course, for a game like Shadow of the Colossus, maybe this approach works- after all, the game relies on minimalism, and doesn’t have as much going on as, say, Battlefield would. Still, it’s definitely an alternate approach available to developers if they want to leverage what the PS4 Pro has to offer.