Current Events > How is checkerboard 4K different from upscaled 1080p?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like, what makes checkerboard 4K different from what a 4K TV already does to 1080p content?


I ask this because of people saying the PS4 Pro only does "checkerboard 4K", and that some Xbox One X titles will do this instead of native 4K.
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Just more numbers for desperate nerds to throw at each other.
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I've also wondered this myself, but never googled it yet. lol
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upscaling blows up an image and sharpens it. checkerboard rendering takes an incomplete image and fills in the rest. the latter produces a significantly sharper image.
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If we go extremely basic, then upscaling doubles every pixel to give us the same picture, while checkerboarding renders two pictures that it merges into one picture.
The first picture renders every second pixel while the second picture renders the missing pixels.
This requires less power than rendering a native 4K picture, and the result is better than upscaling.
Now the difference between native 4K and Checkerboarding is pretty slim. If it is a picture with no moving parts, then the end result should be the same at perfect conditions.
But games got moving parts for most of the time, so we will get a difference in the end result.
But most of the time, you are sitting too far away from your TV to actually see a difference, and you need to sit with your head close to a PC monitor and zoom in on pictures taken by a pixelcounting website to actually see the difference.
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That sounds kind of similar to interlacing.
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Interlacing sends half the lines every frame while checkerboarding sends all lines every frame.
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