After years of fence sitting I bought a great 65'' Samsung LED 4K HDR panel. My 1080p was too small for my tastes and it was time to go big or go home. And so I did.
After 4 hours of professional calibration it was time to enter the new ave. Movies look drop dead gorgeous, with lots of clarity. Mind you, the effect was nowhere near as revelatory as sdtv->1080p, but it was good enough.
But when time came to plug in my beloved PS4 Pro, I couldn't be more dissapointed, and worse, worried at the implications of the industry sudden affair with 4K.
Simply put it. Games look certainly /clearer/ but they don't look /better/.
And so it dawned on me. I know even the almighty X can't manage to reach native 4K most of the time, and that's with games being targeted at a really weak console (The S). The X meanwhile was a $500 console. And while the added resolution is nice, there is no room to add more graphical effects that put the games closer to real life at all.
What dawned on me is that next gen, with consoles probably targeting native 4K, we're not getting the generational leap we could have had if devs had stayed on 1080p or the much more healthy middle of 1440p. The jump in power previously used to advance lighting, polygons and calculations are now being used to stretch the image with negligible difference in "realism".
And you know what's that? Because real life doesn't need resolution. You can watch a football match on a 240p portable bLack and white TV and it will certainly look more realistic to you than Star Citizen at 16K ever will.
So it is of my opinion that devs should focus more on creating new rendering techniques to advance the content of the images instead of the images instead. But given that is gonna most certainly not gonna be the case, we'll be advancing at turtle speed now with consoles being judged on their ability to reach such a high resolution so that the badly lit rock texture can be a bit noisier.
Before you ask me, I tried every high profile game you can name (GoW, Horizon, Spiderman, SOTC, AC Origins, RDR2, RE7) and it was always the same. HDR /is/ pretty great but it being tied to 4K is a commercial, not technical decision.
So yeah, it's a shame we're losing current and future power and tech advancements to sell TVs instead of advancing as a medium.
Edit: a well though simplification of the argument by a very analytical poster.
After 4 hours of professional calibration it was time to enter the new ave. Movies look drop dead gorgeous, with lots of clarity. Mind you, the effect was nowhere near as revelatory as sdtv->1080p, but it was good enough.
But when time came to plug in my beloved PS4 Pro, I couldn't be more dissapointed, and worse, worried at the implications of the industry sudden affair with 4K.
Simply put it. Games look certainly /clearer/ but they don't look /better/.
And so it dawned on me. I know even the almighty X can't manage to reach native 4K most of the time, and that's with games being targeted at a really weak console (The S). The X meanwhile was a $500 console. And while the added resolution is nice, there is no room to add more graphical effects that put the games closer to real life at all.
What dawned on me is that next gen, with consoles probably targeting native 4K, we're not getting the generational leap we could have had if devs had stayed on 1080p or the much more healthy middle of 1440p. The jump in power previously used to advance lighting, polygons and calculations are now being used to stretch the image with negligible difference in "realism".
And you know what's that? Because real life doesn't need resolution. You can watch a football match on a 240p portable bLack and white TV and it will certainly look more realistic to you than Star Citizen at 16K ever will.
So it is of my opinion that devs should focus more on creating new rendering techniques to advance the content of the images instead of the images instead. But given that is gonna most certainly not gonna be the case, we'll be advancing at turtle speed now with consoles being judged on their ability to reach such a high resolution so that the badly lit rock texture can be a bit noisier.
Before you ask me, I tried every high profile game you can name (GoW, Horizon, Spiderman, SOTC, AC Origins, RDR2, RE7) and it was always the same. HDR /is/ pretty great but it being tied to 4K is a commercial, not technical decision.
So yeah, it's a shame we're losing current and future power and tech advancements to sell TVs instead of advancing as a medium.
Edit: a well though simplification of the argument by a very analytical poster.
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