Reply 80 of 264, by ZellSF
darry wrote on 2020-09-26, 19:41:The point that I am trying to make, or more accurately the question I have is just how noticeable the jump to 8K will be. I have my doubts about the "very noticeable" aspect
OK, here's a screenshot of GZDoom running at 1920x1080:
You might not see anything wrong, but that's fine, here's the same screenshot running at 3840x2160 downsampled to 1920x1080:
Now you should see that the rings under the closest UFO are much more defined at 3840x2160, and the one behind that is suddenly visible.
Now these shots are 1920x1080 for easier comparison, but the clarity of the rings looks exactly the same at 4K native. Notice how the rings below the farthest UFO are still missing at 3840x2160. Are you saying that's not very noticeable? Obviously, this gets fixed when rendering at 8K.
darry wrote on 2020-09-26, 17:25:The point that I am trying to make, or more accurately the question I have is just how noticeable the jump to 8K will be. I have my doubts about the "very noticeable" aspect, especially if rendering is done at 8K only to have the results donwnsample to for display on a lower resolution display (effectively anti-aliasing, which is great, but also less and less useful as resolution increases).
As shown above, it is not only anti-aliasing, but you're right it becomes less useful as resolution increases, but the point it stops being useful isn't at 4K. Try playing Alien Isolation at 4K and then try telling me with a straight face that you didn't see any aliasing.
Alien Isolation is interesting because it has temporal anti-aliasing available as a mod. If you use that, you won't get any aliasing at 4K... However, sparks in the game will be practically invisible. Post-processing and temporal anti-aliasing (which is what a lot of modern games use) removing fine detail is also an issue that is greatly remedied by downsampling from a higher resolution.
darry wrote on 2020-09-26, 19:41:I am not against progress, but I feel this is starting to look like the, IMHO largely pointless, megapixel race in the digital camera world . There is more to digital camera image quality than megapixels (dynamic range, noise performance, autofocus performance and accuracy, etc) and there is more to video game quality than rendering/display resolution (display and processing pipeline color depth, light/shadow rendering algorithms, texture resolution, frame rate, 3D model detail, etc ).
EDIT: Is increasing resolution beyond 4K the most "bang for the buck" path towards a better visual quality gaming experience ?
No, but several of the things you listed requires the developers involvement, and they will never spend resources for high end graphics that most people won't have the hardware for. Pushing resolution is often the only thing you CAN do at the high end of visual fidelity. And it still can give notable improvements even at 8K.
darry wrote on 2020-09-26, 19:41:In other words, considering that there are diminishing returns at each jump in resolution (320x200 or less --> SD --> 2K--> 4K --> 8K), I am seriously questioning the value that 8K rendering and/or display will bring to me and others at normal monitor or TV viewing distances, versus the computational/financial/environmental cost .
If any of those are concerns, then sticking to 1280x720 is probably the most sensible thing. You probably can't go lower because it will make text unreadable in a lot of modern titles. It also makes more sense to get a console, though obviously game and controller preferences might remove that option.