PS4 Pro upscaling to 4K and HDR. Will these technologies come to PC?

Now that the hype for the PS4 Pro is well underway, I, as a die-hard PC gamer, want to know if AMD (and Nvidia) will ever give us a driver update that would allow us to enable a similar upscaling technique used by the PS4 Pro? It's AMDs hardware in that console, after all, so if it's something that's inherently in the Polaris silicon, why not enable PC users to play in a "fake 4K resolution", with the benefit of half the performance cost?

Also, the (in my opinion more important) question is, when will we see the fruits of that "better pixels" initiative that AMD started almost a year ago. (just google "wccftech better pixels" for reference). I really want my monitor and / or TV that is hooked-up to my PC to be able to put out 10-bit color and do HDR like the PS4 Pro can! Will PC games also support HDR displays?

It's a bit ironic that in this case, the PC seems to be left in the dust of a fairly significant technological innovation by a console, wheres in the past it was always the pioneer of such things.

Is there any indication on when such upscaler and HDR could be coming to PCs and / or PC monitors?

 

Bro you are lost...

When were you hiding since you registered in these forums in 2003? Playing ONLY on consoles? :3eyes:

Google "Nvidia DSR" and "AMD VSR" and you'll know that this upscaling feature was enabled on AMD/Nvidia GPUs drivers years ago.

About HDR some PC GPUs already support it.

2016 AMD GPUs (Polaris) support HDR:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/39423-radeon-2016-gpus-supports-hdmi-2-0a-dp-1-3-and-hdr

Nvidia Pascal has HDR support:

http://techfrag.com/2016/05/23/nvidia-gtx-1080-hdr-ready-4k-streaming-via-playready-3-0/

Even new Kaby lake Intel CPUs have HDR support:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/40959-kaby-lake-gpu-learns-hardware-hdr

What we need now are monitors and TVs with HDR at an affordable price.

 

Its not the same thing. The way the Sony Pro is doing it requires considerably less power from the gpu for the same result. It uses the checkerboard process. Read about it here:

http://www.gamepur.com/news/24203-p...olution-using-upscaling-technique-called.html

DSR and VSR still render the game at the resolution you set it to and have the same performance hit.

As for my opinion, the upscaler only works if you have a 4k tv in the first place. For computers, that means having a 4k monitor and/or 4k tv for it to even work, and then wouldnt you rather just run native 4k in the first place? Video cards are so close to doing it without any of these tricks at solid fps.

 

Obviously the upscaler on PS4 PRO will only work if the TV (or monitor) is 4K, in case of a 1080 TV/monitor the user will have a option to choose between more FPS or a better image quality (effects) compared to a "regular" PS4.Maybe, finally almost all games will run there at 1080/60...on this particular console on current gen games.

AFAIK the up-scaling trick on PS4 PRO will not make miracles: "fake" 4K at 30 fps (not stables).The GPU power in the new console will be around 1 Tflops less than in a Polaris 480.Simply not enough power to give REAL 4K image.

The "4K" in the PS4 PRO will be a fake 4K in the sense it will come from a 1080 image and up-scaled to 4K (extrapolated to fill the screen pixels, not originally rendered at 4K).

I'm tired of console tricks like variable resolution/internal upscaling (QB i'm looking at you) and lately variable FPS at cost of image quality (on demand). a 4K TV also sports an upscaler from 1080 (or even SD) to his native 4K res and the final result doesn't magically improve the quality of the image...it only fills the pixels on the screen. :3eyes:

The down-sampled and final image we get on PC via 4K VSR/DSR is an image rendered at REAL 4K and then interpolated (down-scaled) to a lower res like 1080 or 1440 before sent to a monitor.

Maybe next year Xbox Scorpio will be able to provide REAL 4K/30 gaming but i'm not going to bet on that. In the best case it'll need to be at least 4 times more powerful than a Xbox One to do that since the current console is unable to provide 1080/30 gaming (a few exceptions) and a 4K image has four times more pixels than a 1080 image.Remasters and Tetris like don't count as current gen games.

I have nothing against consoles, i own a PS3, a PS4 and a Xbox 360.
400 euros consoles can only match 800 euros PC GPU power in the wildest console fanboy dreams.Reality is hard for non-blind console fanboys.

 

Consoles been tricking people forever the ps3 was supposed to first 1080p system too that never happend and technical ps4 and xbox one both have issue with 1080p

the pro and s both are gona trick console people in to think they have real 4k and ms scorpio will sound good and better then ps4 pro, is not ment to go again the ps4 pro I doubt we seen what sony has to go against the scorpio project

Console will probably be scaling game to the target res for long time to come.

 

You never cease to amaze.

The OP asked about a upscaling feature.

You provided downscaling features...

What the OP wants: render at lower resolution, display at higher resolution.
What you answered: render at higher resolution, display at lower resolution.

Polar opposites.

For what it's worth, upscaling algorithms used on consoles are generally much more sophisticated and effective than ones used on PC (i.e. in video games or on graphics cards).

 

Yes, downscaling is the opposite of upscaling but i wrote about downsampling not downscaling, downsampling is a 2 step process that improve the image quality in games.

In a first step an image is rendered at 4K (i.e.) and in a second step a downscaled 1080 (i.e.) image is created from the higher res image information (real pixel information) in order to get an objectively better 1080 image than an image directly rendered at 1080. The final downsampled image will have less jaggies, call it brute force AA if you like.

What OP wants is the PC GPU hardware to perform a similar internal job than the one a 4K TV upscaler apply to any sub 4K res image it has as source to fill the pixels on screen.

PS4 PRO can add some fancy trick to the upscaling process algorithm but it'll still be upscaling not a REAL rendered image at higher res.Is the PS4 PRO doing a better job than a 4K TV upscaler?Maybe.
Could it be better? YES.
Could it be much better and near real 4K quality? NO.

In AMD settings the (old) feature he looks for is here:



GPU scaling "ON", scaling Mode "Full panel".

I agree that consoles upscalers should work better than a TV upscaler or even PC GPUs upscalers.It seems AMD put more effort on his consoles GPU than in his PC GPUs drivers and tricks.

Upscaling doesn't improve the image quality in gaming: it only fills the pixels on a screen with a higher res (more pixels) than the internally rendered image.The processing algorithm could be better or worst but it never improve s his quality.

An upscaled image has only more pixels than original not more quality that's why the image in a 4K TV doesn't look better than in a 1080 TV when both have the same size in inches and same panel quality IF the source image (i.e. live TV or DVD/BD) is 1080.

 

Thank you all for the provided information - I've learned something new.

I'm not very active on any forum. Just when I have a burning question that I don't see a thread for, I post one. I've never owned a console in my life.


So HDR is supported on the graphics card side of hardware (and drivers, I recon), but is not supported on PC monitors? As till this day I haven't heard a word about a PC game that supports this new HDR, there seems to also be no support on the software side (the only tidbit about that was in a nvidia article titled "Implementing HDR in Rise of the Tomb Raider, but that never made it to the actual commercially available PC version of the game till this day.)


As for the checkerboard upscaling, I'd actually very much like to have that option (more options is always good, yes? as noone is forcing it on you) in the drivers, so I could, for instance, hook up a shiny new 4K HDR TV to my PC and get that "fake 4K" at half the performance cost. Would be great to have that option.

 

lol its all good....Just keep in mind like sammarbella said we have had scaling on pc since the dark ages.....actually im not sure when we didnt lol. If you run a game at 720p on a 1080p display.....yea i guess you could call it magic that it fills in the entire screen lol:banana: (and of course it doesn't look great)

Regarding HDR displays....its still very new yet. Maybe we get SOME at the end of this year and more next year. A lot of people are holding out buying displays because of this actually.

 

+1 to this.

Also ---can only match 1300Euros PC GPU power (TITAN X Pascal), and not even TITAN X Pascal can't do all games at 4K 60FPS, unless overclocked.

 

Yup, there is a curved 65" 4k HDR tv calling my name, but until I can get one that has low input lag and has a price tag I can afford, I will hold out. Not to mention I need a video card that can run 4k and I will have to get a new reciever that can run 4k @ 60fps and do HDR.....Stuff gets expensive!

So yeah, I am holding out for HDR as well. I am guessing it will be another year before I jump on a new TV.

 

Do you mean GPU (up)scaling on Nvidia GPUs? This 2011 thread explains how to enable/disable it on Nvidia GPUs settings, it's nothing specially "hi-tech":

http://forums.evga.com/Turn-GPU-Scaling-on-or-off-m1386005.aspx

Be aware that in Windows 10 Nvidia GPU settings force GPU scaling, here you can see a solution to disable it if you prefer the TV to do the job:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=592511209

I guess the first 2 years will be very expensive...

I was lucky to buy the last 2014 1080p active 3D LG 60' plasma model in production...for less than 800 euros!

Until i can buy a 85' OLED 4K with HDR for a similar price i will wait.

By that time maybe 4K content with HDR will be the norm.

 

Actually most, if not all, games internally process color in the HDR range, and there is usually a downgrade to LDR in later stages of the pipeline. HDR needs to be supported by the panel (and there are two competing standards ), the GPU and the game. Game and GPU support is mostly an issue of patches and the display controller. Even the original PS4 will be getting HDR output.

Consoles have some nice tricks for upscaling and frame control. The checkerboard upscaling is a very nice trick, as are dynamic horizontal resolutions that a lot of games implement. Same for dynamic frame locking, true triple buffering and frame rate adjustments, who instead of being implemented are ignored completely in favor of solutions like Gsync/Freesync that push even more hardware out, instead of at least trying to mend the problems for most users in the software level. Unfortunately, due to the "master race" cancer that has consumed PC gaming, nobody talks about things like that any more in the PC space, because the solution is always "go git da best cardz pesant!". Such a pity really, all of that stuff would be perfectly implemented by GPU drivers today.

 

The checkerboard upscaling does look really interesting, shame there's so little information about it, Alex Vlachos from Valve mentions it in his Advanced VR Rendering Performance presentation at GDC this year.

http://alex.vlachos.com/graphics/Alex_Vlachos_Advanced_VR_Rendering_Performance_GDC2016.pdf

It's discussed in the 'Reconstruction' section of the PDF for anyone that's interested, not a huge amount of information however.

 

What they do (more or less) is that they write a shader that extrapolates the values from a single pixel, to four pixels. It helps very much that 4k is literealy 1080p times four. I would like to see some of the tech used for VR find its way to more traditional games, since it's all focused around low latencies and no stutter. Reprojection itself would be interesting to see in a "normal" title.

 

Again, thank you people for the provided information.

This is actually what I'm afraid of. Because every game needs to be patched to make it output an HDR image, I think only games released next year and beyond will get the HDR treatment. Very, very, very few devs revisit older titles to patch new technology in. Hope that (perhaps) ROTR will get that HDR on PC...

 

Why not just get a projector at that point? My game/home theater room is rather small, so a projector would be a bit much, especially considering how its shaped. I would totally do a projector if I had the room. But as it is, my eyes to the screen is barely over 6 feet and my current 55" is pretty big in front of me. I think a 65" would be as big as I can get in this tiny room, but damn, it will be awesome!

HDR and 4k will be the norm when hardware can effectively push it without tapping out like a little girls. Or who knows, maybe there will be something even better than HDR. Time will tell.

 

I think it could go either way. You have to realize that the number of people who even have HDR tvs right now are such a small percent. People with HDR tvs who game are an even smaller percentage. People with HDR monitors even smaller. People who pc game with a HDR tv as a monitor are a way smaller percentage than that.

Point is, support will be very limited at the start for everyone. I have a feeling consoles will get more HDR support at first- simply as a selling point, and to help boost sales of HDR tvs.

AND/OR

I honestly have no idea how challenging it is to add HDR support to a game that is already done, or how hard it is to implement it in new development. If its super easy and does not require much, perhaps we will see it in every major release in a year or two. Or it will be difficult and devs will see it as wasted resources if only 1-5% of the population who game even have a HDR tv in the first place.

Just my opinion/thoughts on the matter.

 

These "technologies" have been around for ages on PC.

Nothing new here.

I remember back on the Nvidia 6800 when the FIRST Farcry had HDR added and everybody went nutz! It was a big thing back then.

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-m...04/how-do-you-enable-hdr-in-far-cry-25656633/

OVER 9 years ago!

12 years to be exact! March 23, 2004 - Farcry release date.

Upscaling through drivers (Nvidias side) known as DSR, has been around since the GTX 900 series launch. It was one of the big selling points for the GTX 980 and 970. This series was early 2014. Of course you could upscale through 3rd party programs way before these drivers, just this was the "official" method.

Bro I'm amazed you even have a PC like that with a GTX 970 in it. Almost all PC games have HDR rendering anymore, and if you go into your control panel you will find DSR upscale values x2.00, x3.00 etc!

Your PC monitor is lightyears beyond any TV set. TV sets NEED the HDR10 added through the hardware build INTO the TV.

Your monitor will display HDR no matter through the video card. You do NOT need a "HDR10" PC monitor...no such thing.

No...every PC game you have played BF4 ...BF3..Bioshock Trilogy. They all had a form of HDR built INTO the engine. That is why you don't always see the option to turn it off and on. The list goes on.

PC games have always been superior. I own a PS4 and X1S...so it's not fanboyism.

Please don't be confused.

So back to this topic, people will argue its not HDR unless you have a 10bit panel....wrong....HDR is HDR...the fact is you just have either 8bit HDR or 10bit HDR.

Most PC monitors over the last 3-4 years have 10 bit panels that you can enable in nvidia CP.

Even then you won't VISUALLY notice a difference much at ALL.

 

Sigh.
In-engine HDR is completely different technology from display HDR. Please read up on what display HDR actually is.