It's complicated. (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Tuesday, July 03, 2018, 09:42 (2342 days ago) @ Cody Miller

The CG work is in fact rendered at 2K if the film is finished in 2K.

I'm not sure to what extend rectangular-grid buffers larger than 2K are used, but regardless, prerendered CGI is generally highly supersampled. If you're rasterizing, you use lots of "pixels" to produce the color for each final pixel; if you using a technique along the lines of ray tracing, you cast lots of rays from each pixel.

I am not doubting this, but the boost to image quality is slight.

I'm not arguing otherwise, I'm just explaining why people aren't necessarily unreasonable to disagree.

This isn't a matter that you can address with a simple acuity argument, because undersampling produces artifacts that can be detected much more easily. For instance, it's easy to make out specular flicker on normal map aliasing in some seventh-gen games even if you're playing them on a 40" screen from some ridiculous distance like 50 feet.

People's sensitivity to these sorts of things also need to be weighed against the extent to which they agree with the importance of more complex rendering. I mean, you keep bringing up Quake as this obviously-hideous game; Quake is graphically very simple compared with modern games, but whether it actually looks bad as a result is more subjective and not everyone agrees.