re: Get ready for 2pm for the Neo announcement!

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But most of the games the company showed were not rendering a native 4K image. Instead, you were probably seeing something closer to 1440p or 1800p. That’s quite a lot less detail than 2160p — although, for the Sony’s new supersystem, it doesn’t matter.

The PS4 Pro does not have the horsepower to render native 4K. Developers are already admitting that. So if PS4 isn’t rendering native 4K images, then what is it doing? Magic!

“It’s not native 4K. But as you see for yourself, it’s perceptively so close that you wouldn’t be able to see the difference.”

“With PS4 Pro, our strategy has instead been to foster streamlined rendering techniques that can take advantage of custom hardware,” he said. “When coupled with best-in-breed temporal and spatial anti-aliasing algorithms, the results can be astonishing.”

When we decode Cerny’s high-elven language, we can break down some of what is happening (with some help from the smart folks over at Digital Foundry).

The “streamlined rendering techniques” likely refers to a special feature built into the AMD Radeon graphics processor of the Pro where games only have to render approximately half of the pixels of standard 4K. That’s still around 4 million individual pixels, which is twice what you get from a native 1080p image — hence the need for a more powerful CPU and GPU in the Pro.

Those 4 million pixels are arranged into a 4K checkerboard pattern where half the checkerboard squares contain image data and the empty half contain nothing. The Pro should then use an algorithm to rebuild the image and fill in the empty squares for a 4K screen. Now, this technique would typically generate jagged edges and ugly artifacts whenever objects are in motion, but that’s where the temporal antialiasing comes in. That technique should smooth out any roughness and give the final image that crisp, ultra-high-definition look.

And I think that Sony deserves credit for the early results. VentureBeat editor Harrison Weber saw the Pro running its games in person. He told me that the difference was stark when Sony reps would run him through a demo and turn 4K and HDR on and off. Even in the videos that Sony uploaded to sites like YouTube, you can see some of the threads in Spider-Man’s suit in 4K — although YouTube’s compression algorithm definitely eats a lot of the finer details.

So instead of trying to quadruple the resolution, Sony is going to double or maybe triple it, and then it’s going to let algorithms and the shortcomings of 20/20 vision do the rest.

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