The difference is that the resolution matters far less as the physical screen size decreases. The Switch can be on a large screen for docked mode, but that's not the only way it will be played, and possibly the less common way. And, when they say it's the best HANDHELD shooter they have seen they could just as likely be referring to the smaller screen of handheld as the lower computational power of handheld. I think that is what Deep means.

What’s more fun, Halo or Halo 4?

Hey remember when I said 4K was a waste because you could get better looking games at 1080p? That instead of rendering 4x the pixels you could use better effects on the ones that you have with all that extra GPU power?

The Switch port of Wolfenstein New Colossus runs at a low resolution, often down to 640 x 360, but opted to keep all the effects and stuff from the other versions. The result? Well according to Digital Foundry:

"It's the best looking handheld shooter we've ever seen"

#morefxfewerpixels #4KButnotToday

I know there is a vocal subset of gamers that like to jerk-off to how good a game looks, the resolution, effects blah blah blah.

I am not one of them.

As long as the game is FUN and runs smoothly for what it is, it doesn't have to look hyper realistic etc.

Graphics are not separate from fun. You interface with a game almost exclusively through audio and visual means. What’s more ‘fun’ : exploring a gorgeous detailed world? Or a world that looks like Quake 1? What’s more fun, killing an enemy with a cool explosion with great particle effects, or just having a crappy explosion sprite?

Alright I'll bite- Halo CE VS Destiny 2. I vastly, VASTLY prefer Halo CE over D2. I remember exploring the levels in HCE way past the developers intended scope, such as running out into the middle of nowhere on mission 2, just because I could. Or trying to explore the depths of the silent cartographer. Of course I know there are no enemies down there etc, or the textures ended at a point and things got less polished. It was hella fun!

I absolutely remember exploring the world of the original Doom and Doom 2, for hours. Just because. Legitimate secret areas were icing on the cake. D2 kinda has those with lost sectors, and I remember mentioning what a shame it was that several of them were beautiful to the point where the rest of the game didn't have anything like them visually, that they were unique but they just got....repetitive.

Exploding a group of grunts and elites with a rocket, and then how ms-paint looking their blood puddles on the ground were- didn't care! Popping a dregs head and that woosh of ether that happens is pretty neat too, but I'm not sure that I'd dislike it if it didn't have that for example. It's just satisfying to pop them.

D2. I stopped playing it. It isn't fun for me. It LOOKS GORGEOUS. Fantastic attention paid to details and environments. But none of that matters. It's just D1 all over again. No substance. Can't explore as much. Feels like it isn't encouraged, actually it feels like it's discouraged. "See somewhere and you can go there" LMAO- noooope.

Graphics are part of the fun in a real way. So you should absolutely care how your game looks. Also please point to where I said I want hyper realism, because I never said that.

I didn't and I never said you did.

I simply commented that I think people who focus on graphics miss the point.

Did playing D1 on xbox 360 make it any less fun than having the graphics of XB1? I recall several people on these forums saying that it didn't It certainly didn't HURT, but it wasn't important.

True graphical fidelity died with 2D pixel art. Everything since 1995 has been utter trash.

/s

Then set your calendar for August 8th:

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/2018/06/21/unavowed-coming-august-8th/

Tl;dr, player choice is the ideal solution (everyone, be more like DE!), but right now, 1080p is the gold standard. 4k is the future, but the race to jump on it comes as a detriment to the player experience.

Also think about the fact that 2K (2048 x 1080) has long been, and still is a cinema standard, where screens are 25 FEET or more. The CGI work in the Martian looked pretty damn realistic on the big screen right? Guess what, it was 2K.

I dunno about all of that tangent, since it has absolutely nothing to do with games or modern gaming hardware, making it moot and dumb.

...but I will say that If you look at Fury Road, one of the best-looking films in recent memory, the 4k release is an upscaled version of a 3K film with 2K effects. Doesn't matter, fantastic-looking film.

And a film like Cloverfield, which recently got a 4K release, looks absolutely terrible, and is at its most enjoyable when you're watching it at DVD quality.

Games need to be rendered at whatever sample rates and output resolutions necessary to pull off the desired visuals. And this is not only subjective, but also sometimes counter-intuitive.

Take Ridge Racer 7. It embraced the whole "HD console" thing, and went 1080p60 at PS3 launch. In order to hit that target, it's graphical makeup is - besides texture quality and resolution - mostly not very interesting even by PS2-era standards. But artistically it was designed around that razor-sharp hyper-speed look... it looks great on my HD LCD, but despite the visual simplicity, it looks poor on my SD CRt; all of its luster is just gone at low res.

Take The Last of Us. Very visually complex, very richly detailed. But, it's got a smudgy visual composition, and assets are generally authored in such a way that they still convey their intent and are readable when heavily filtered down. And consequentially, when I played it in a ridiculous 16:9 360i window on my SD CRT, I was surprised to find a game that still looked excellent and remained very visually readable.

Also think about the fact that 2K (2048 x 1080) has long been, and still is a cinema standard, where screens are 25 FEET or more. The CGI work in the Martian looked pretty damn realistic on the big screen right? Guess what, it was 2K. It looked so good because they had the ability to spend an hour per frame to render graphical effects.

Movie comparisons tend to be misleading in the context of game rendering, for two main reasons.

First, depth of field tends to increase perceived clarity on unblurred objects. That's fine for movies, but with games, having ultra-clarity everywhere is often desirable in and of itself.

Second, we need to separate output reconstruction with sample rate.
Movies aren't rendered at 2K, they're mastered at 2K. When using a physical camera, a ton of photons are involved in determining the color of each pixel. When rendering CGI, a ton of samples are taken at every pixel.
It's easy to blow off this issue by saying "just use better antialiasing", but that's not really a complete solution. There are a lot of types of detail that contribute to a game scene, and within current rendering methodology, very few of them are actually being filtered correctly down from high sample rates. And that produces macro-scale inaccuracies that can't simply be swept under the rug.
Even if we're playing on a 1080p display from a considerable distance, there are a ton of respects in which games do look cleaner if you boost the rendering resolution beyond 1080p and do a good resample to produce the final output.

Oh, also:

Assuming he has 20/20 vision

There's a very high probability that he has better than 20/20 vision.

20/20 vision isn't good visual acuity, it's the boundary of what's considered healthy. That is, having acuity worse than 20/20 can be indicative of a problem.

Typical values for healthy young people are more in the ballpark of 20/15. (So a lot of people do even better than that.)