PS4 Pro non optimized games on 4k tv? How do they work?

[Gdourado]

Hello, how are you?

I am wondering this.

Some games like Horizon, Uncharted and God of War have PS4 Pro features that enable checkerboard rendering to display an almost 4k image and from what I see on reviews, the result is pretty good!

But there are lots of PS4 games that have no Pro support or no higher than 1080p resolution.

So I am wondering how do those games work on a 4K tv and do they look worse than on a 1080p TV?

From what I can tell, almost no TV's out there do nearest neighbour at 1080p when they use 4 pixels to display a single 1080p pixel.

But Tv's always seem to use some sort of upscaler and that can degrade image quality and add lag and latency to the gameplay.

Is this an issue in practice?

 

Cheers!

[Princess Luna]

Usually 1080p will look better on a 1080p native screen.

[tikker]

You've answered your own question mostly already: they upscale. How they do it and how good it will look depends on the algorithm that they use and the amount of post-processing thrown against it. Obviously native 4k will look better than upscaled FHD, but if you have a nice FHD signal then it'll probably not be terrible.

 

Every now and then I stream 1080p games from my PC to my 4k TV and while you definitely notice the difference between that and running in 4k if you look for it, I don't find it distracting when actually playing.

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Usually 1080p will look better on a 1080p native screen.

I argue as long as the PPI of the resolution is higher than 96 PPI (well, appreciably so), 1080p will look better on that screen regardless if it's the native resolution or not. Though this is speaking from noticing that 1440p doesn't look appreciably worse on a 27" 4K screen than a native 27" 1440p screen.

 

(Also just throwing some food for thought)

 

EDIT: This only applies to monitors. I have no freaking idea how this applies to TVs because viewing distances and crap.

[ono]

That's an interesting question. I maybe could answer if the PS4 Pro does the 4K scaling or not (and thus it is done by the TV) for non-enhanced games by looking at the source details on my TV.

 

Regardless, it looks fine to me. I doubt my visual acuity could make out subtle differences without it being side-by-side with a very close viewing distance though.