Inside a game engine, scenes are described in great mathematical detail. Your screen that the game will be displayed on doesn't have resolution that high, so the game decides what color each pixel will be by taking a sample from the underlying scene description. These samples can be taken in all sorts of patterns. A regular grid is the simplest to imagine, but using simple patterns can exaggerate the sharpness of transitions between color zones, the results being perceived as aliasing or shimmer.
Jittering is when the the sample position is moved around slightly each time, so that you get less predictable, less harsh transitions. But you probably don't want to just take samples at random, so often the "jitter" is repeated over and over in larger units. This is what I think we might be seeing on edges in
Ys VIII. Here's a 400% zoom that shows what I mean.
Note how there's not a sharp edge, nor a gradually smooth edge, but noise broken up into chunks along the outline. It's not impossible that this is artifacts from checkerboard rendering (CBR). But it really doesn't look like it to me. As the name implies, CBR uses a regular grid. When it messes up, its artifacts are gridlike too. Here's a 400% zoom of a waving flag:
(Note that CBR is almost never this bad;
Watch_Dogs 2 has by far the worst CBR artifacting I've seen. I picked it precisely because it's unusual, an extreme example that's very obvious.)
Keep in mind that I include these details because I observed them and I try to be open about my analysis. In practice, even the worst case may be barely visible, from viewing distances on a regular screen. The noise in
Ys VIII is not necessarily bad; it does soften edges and reduce aliasing. And on Pro, the game has a
much higher resolution than on standard PS4. My personal feeling is that the tradeoffs are worth it, but you should make your own decisions. Here's the full 4K shot my zoom comes from. Check it out without zooming and see if it bothers you.
You're right, it's always been phrased weirdly. I was trying to compact too much info into too few words, and the image didn't help. I've made revisions to both; please let me know if it's clearer now.
I apologize, but I won't have time to rectify the footnote problem today. It seems to control the alignment properly I'll have to make them part of the images again. This will increase the vertical extent of the lists, but they're too unruly otherwise. I should have this done tomorrow.
As always, any screenshots or video you can provide would be much appreciated. Any issues, comments, or suggestions are also welcome. Thanks!
