rendering 50% of the pixels means the resolution is halved 
I said after that I though he was going to make a different point than the one he made, it was just a first reaction after seeing the video.
But this particular example isnât the best to argue against native rendering still because Ps5 is only rendering close to half of the pixels of SX, the other half are guessed.
However, his ellaboration on B3D that if you take 1080p-1440p DLSSâd to 4K, versus 4k CB versus 1800p upscaled to 4K does not yield linear results explains better his point.
In this case DLSS is the better, 1800p second and 4K CB being significantly worse than the rest, which is not what you would expect from the starting resolutions
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Might also be a pre-emptive retort as other less careful YouTubers doing pixel counting might grab a frame and inadvertently cahlk it up to higher res on PS5 w/o considering CBR. Alex moving the discourse in the right direction before that catches on would be nice but yeah the number he put on screen didnât help imho.
DF should not have to account for the stupidity, ignorance, or deliberate console warring by idiots. Those people would have grasped at straws whether or not numbers flashed up on the screen.
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Eh, DF certainly should have to account for ignorance of its viewership. Thatâs the only reason DF exists (to give out factual info and inform viewers of tech and its implementations). I donât think youâd see tweets like this one below if not for the numbers flashing on screen. Those fanboys would just ignore the game entirely or cling to the 2 sec loading advantage. Itâs ok though since it shines a spotlight on the types who donât watch the vids and instead just look to find info they think fits their narrative.
https://twitter.com/baltazardarocha/status/1374791432729473026
It means the number of pixels rendered each frame is halved. The actual resolution though is not.
As for another example DLSS. You might render fewer pixels and have a lower final resolution. but achieve a better final image as weâve seen in countless demonstrations.
So if I render these pixels
is this 4k or only 19671 pixels?
Yes, with DLSS you render natively to 1080p and then upscale with a neural network to your target resolution. It still only renders 1080p. Thats why it saves so much time. Its the same for checkerboard rendering, saving half the pixel rendering cost is the whole point.
Yes but the point he was making is the FINAL resolution in the pipeline whatever you report is a number and doesnât tell the whole story. The final measurable resolution IS in some cases higher on PS5 but looks worse. Full stop.
Thatâs the point heâs making. We all know why that is the case. But as he says elsewhere it potentially could get more complex once you throw DLSS or a ML equivalent into the mix and you are comparing potentially a standard TAA native/dynamic render vs CBR vs some form of ML reconstruction.
And the final measurable resolution wonât tell the story.
This view is understandable if you reduce the focus purely to current gen comparisons, but the fact that some people see this as them now downplaying the importance of resolution (for reasons) is a problem purely of their own making. You would find it hard to look back and find an early last gen comparison from the team that didnât focus on the resolution difference and the sizable benefits it made to the IQ and game experience. Sometimes as many as 10 mentions in 1 article and who can forget Richardâs provocatively titled " Xbox One Resolutiongate: the 720p fallout" opinion piece?
Last gen they spent considerable wordage leaning into resolution and created this narrative, so if they want people to understand their reasons for the change in analysis focus they will need to spend equal wordage explaining that to people they convinced resolution was king last gen.
Seems a bit harsh to be calling people out on their views when (from what google tells me) DF havenât published any take on why and how the focus of their analysis has changed this gen and why resolution is no longer so important.
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DF has said back in september iIrc, that pixel count will become obsolete in the near future. It is the first video where it is obvious, because of the checkerboard rendering technique on PS5
And Alex is quite clear in his video that XSX IQ is just better.
Those fanboys are pathetic. Theyâre just trolling and ruining everything, so I think the less attention we give them the better. There will always be some crazy guy who needs some clicks and retweets and people who need to be reassured about their purchase⌠thatâs just how it isâŚ
No they shouldnât because there is no way to account for a million different insecure idiots. The only thing that would come out of that conclusion is stifling creativity and creating a constant dread and worry on how things are presented, something they already experience to an extent because of PS and Xbox fanboys. Itâs pure bullshit that they need to worry about these things because some people put so much emotional investment into a plastic box. Alex did exactly what you said they exist to do: gave out factual info and inform viewers of tech and its implementation. No matter what, youâll have fanboys who bend that info to help them sleep at night. You canât fully account for stupidity and the responsibility should be put on the willfully ignorant fanboys, not the analysis. You can also always just pay less attention to the console war instead of engaging in it. Thatâs always an option as well.
They did explain their reasoning for a change in direction, multiple times by now. It made sense to put a bigger focus on resolution last gen because it mattered more. However now with pixel densities being as high as they are, new forms of AA that didnât exist at the start of last gen, and the introduction of reconstruction techniques, resolution counts do matter less. Before techniques like TAA were developed and widely used a lower resolution would produce horrible jaggies and shimmering. However now, a lower resolution will generally produce a softer but still overall clean image.
Your post makes it seem like there is some kind of agenda over at DF when I think thatâs a lot less fair to them than I am to people here just by saying donât look into what isnât there.
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Where? I canât find anything by searching or is it a topic discussed in a video on some other topic?
Apologies if thatâs how it reads I donât believe DF have any agenda re Sony and MS but I do believe that as the outlet that created and reinforced the narrative they also carry a responsibility to deconstruct in for their followers when appropriate. Perhaps it was a mistake to include Richards name in my first post as it seems to have unnecessarily personalised it for you when it was only intended as a reference. So to be clear I view DF as a media outlet and Iâm not sure how you can be unfair to one of those.
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They âaccount for itâ by avoiding obtuse presentation styles that they know would lead to misunderstanding the point being made. Yes, ppl should take responsibility and go watch the video themselves to hear Alex make his point instead of confusing that with a single image out of context, but he also knew exactly what he was doing. The onus for how best to convey information is on the person presenting the information. If this was another channel not dedicated to education its viewers about such things, then that would be different.
Right, but how you present that information can matter too. He knows how his figures would be paraded around by some ppl. Alex was being deliberately obtuse in his presentation since he wanted to make a point (he literally said so at B3d). BRiT posted his comment already but here ya go:
No need to see every small critique of DF as some sorta hill to die on. Constructive criticism is allowed, last I checked (and yes, suggesting there are more fruitful ways of presenting his point is definitely constructive).
Your framing here is super misguided. FWIW, I understand where you are coming from but the context is what matters and the nuance here completely changes how one should frame resolution metrics.
The only purpose of pixel counting in the first place is to try to pin down a metric for comparing image quality. At the start of last gen these various tricks for eeking out gains in image quality (compared to not using them) didnât exist yet. Nor did the advances in AA. Focusing on things like pixel counts and AF and AA back then made sense since there was no other way to really measure the clarity on screen and pixel counting was directly connected to IQ in an easy to understand way.
Nowadays those naive pixel counting methods can be super misleading since the various upscaling techniques show large variance between their resulting IQ. For instance, a 1440p image upscaled using CBR will look notably much worse in IQ than the same image upscaled from 1080p using DLSS. If DF only focused on the raw pixel counts they would convey exactly the wrong impression to their audiences in this example.
This actually favors Xbox since it is the console with ML SS and VRS capabilities (2 of more important technologies to improve IQ beyond raw pixel counts).
I explain it in my response to you and that reply also includes a post Alex made on another forum where he explains it. 
Theyâve discussed it in their podcasts and have made comments of it on Twitter and message boards. And no worries, nothing was personalized for me, I didnât even notice you mentioned Richardâs name. I just think people should realize that as technology changes, the coverage of technology will also change with it.
Yes I did read what you said. I already have seen what Alex said at B3D, did you read what he said? He was obtuse on showing the end resolution count instead of the internal number for a good reason. What you see on the screen is usually more relevant than whatâs rendered internally.
Iâm not dying on any kind of hill and Iâm not opposed to constructive criticism of DM. Asking them to change what they say because of fanboys that are helpless no matter what is not valid constructive criticism IMO. They are fanboys because they donât give a shit about the truth, no amount of adjusting whatâs presented is going to change that. You want him to change what he says because you donât like what fanboys are saying, not because itâs misleading. His presentation and explanation was perfectly fine, especially when the point was to show how the output resolution is not the most important metric these days. Again, you can just ignore and stop engaging with them and let them scream their ignorance into the ether.
The FUCK is going on in here?
ButâŚnobody said they should âchange what they sayâ. I said there are better ways to present the point they wanna make. As someone who conveys complex topics to naive audiences for a living, I know exactly the pedagogical trick Alex was tryna use here; he wanted to make ppl set up their intuitions to respond to the numbers a certain way so that when he pulled the rug out from under them it makes a more potent impression. That works great in a classroom when ppl arenât investing their entire self image into the outcome in the same way console warriors do on twitter.
The fact is if he presented it differently you would not get that image floating around online confusing ppl. The fanboys would not be gifted ammo to use. He knew that he was stoking the flames a bit. There were ways to make the exact same point without doing that. Iâm not accusing him of something here, so no need to saddle up and ride to their defense or anything. Just noting he didnât do a great job presenting his point when a single image that he puts up in the video can completely undermine it in the minds of ppl not paying close enough attention. He coulda made the same point using any generic base image to upscale using different methods and it would have been better made.
You also arenât considering the non-fanboys who are legit ignorant and dunno any better. Tons of those ppl see that image floating around and take it at face value because ppl they see online are pushing it.
And you can also ignore those of us in this thread critiquing his presentation and let us âtype into the aetherâ too. If this isnât a scenario you think critiquing them is ok then nothing is.
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Alex (DF) made a video about Avengers. In it, he made a very important point about the connection between pixel counts in a give frame and IQ. His point was that naive pixel counting where ya ignore how the pixels got to the screen can lead to misguided conclusions about IQ. For instance, a 1080p image DLSSâd to 4k looks better than a 4k CBR image, despite the latter having twice as many pixels rendered each frame.
As part of his effort to demonstrate this point in Avengers, he shows figures of pixel counts for PS5/XSX versions. The former uses CBR so while it has more pixels in the frame half of them are not contributing to the IQ the way the rendered pixels are. As a result, despite more pixels overall present on screen prior to final upscaling the PS5 version has notably worse IQ.
This is a super important point for Alex to make and a great time to make it since the discrepancy b/t naive pixel counts and IQ is gonna get way worse with adoption of FSR, DLSS, DirectML SS, VRS, CBR, TAA reconstruction, etc. However, using an image in the video with pixel counts presented on purpose to set up the wrong impression (to make his point more potent) lead to ppl posting said image online and spreading FUD about XSXâs resolution relative to PS5âs. So the way he chose to present that element instead undermines his point.
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You say no one is saying no one said they should change what they say then proceed to say how they should change what they say. Iâm not saddling up to anything, Iâm just calling out what is just a silly suggestion. You want him to put up a generic base image, which would create more work, and then have to worry further on how that image could potentially present his point.
There is no winning when it comes to fanboys, thatâs my point. So trying to cater around them is a foolâs game. The willful ignorant non-fanboys are going to be confused regardless, so why should I consider them? People either have an interest in this or they twist it to use for ammo in their childish war. Itâs really that simple.
Also as a mod, no I canât ignore what people say here. My point in criticizing your critique is because itâs based on your annoyance of fanboys that will always exist.
Thatâs not entirely accurate. DLSS is still reconstructs the image up to a targeted resolution. So it would still be a 1440p vs 1440p comparison, itâs just the method used, and resulting quality would be different in the end.
Lemme use a better example since that one was slightly awkward in hindsight. A 1080p image DLSSâd to 4k looks better than a 4k CBR image, despite the latter having twice as many pixels rendered each frame.
There are an awful lot of ppl saying and/or not saying things in this sentence. Itâs like an Abbot and Costello bit, lol. I dunno how to make it more clear to you that he can make the same point using different presentation. This isnât a vague or challenging idea. I donât want him to change his point. I woulda liked to see him present that point in ways that donât instantly undermine said point.
No, my critique is based on the fact that ppl are already being mislead on the basis of how he presented things. I.e. his effort had the polar opposite result of what he wanted to achieve. If you canât criticize an attempt when it does the opposite of what it set out to do then I dunno what youâd imagine is sensible criticism.
You declaring it silly doesnât make it silly. He put thought into presenting his point in that way (he told us so). It just wasnât well thought out. Other super easy approaches requiring little effort on his part could make the point clearer without the attempted head fake that lead to more confusion instead of less. Itâs not silly to point this out. You can assert otherwise all day long but it just ainât so. When the way you presented your point is used so easily to undermine that same point, it just isnât well presented. Thatâs really all there is to say about it.
Note: He can make his exact same point using any two images that use different upscaling methods. He can use images showing off DLSS vs native 4k (he has TONS of such images handy since he did a whole video around exactly this comparison). Instead, he chose to be obtuse for the sake of a rhetorical flourish.
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