PS4 Pro’s Checkerboard 4K Rendering Will Never Look As Good As Native 4K, Requires More Work

The PS4 Pro is nearly here but the debate on how beneficial its 4K upscaling can be compared to native 4K rendering is still on-going. Which one is better even if they both have their advantages depending on the hardware?

GamingBolt spoke to Mark Williams, technical director at VooFoo Studios which has worked on Mantis Burn Racing, and asked about Sony’s checkerboard rendering technique for 4K versus the native 4K that Project Scorpio is apparently offering.

Williams noted the differences and said, “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.”

The PS4 Pro is out on November 10th for $399 and quite a number of developers are coming up with ways to use it best. Will you be buying one? Let us know below.