Chapter 4: Resolution
So I started up The Lab and started messing with rendering resolution slider to see how high I can go before going further stops making any visual difference. 7420 x 4600 per eye (212%) was where it was at. What followed was all I was hoping for but didn't dare to expect. Holy. . Mind. Blown. No words. Should have sent a poet.
There's simply no need for me to make through the lens photos this time around. I took
this screenshot while I was playing, and it happened to happily coincide with exactly the way it looked in VR. Everything on the whiteboard was perfectly readable, just as it is on the screenshot. I even correctly guessed that the
red letters on the wall said "to eyewash station". Tho individual letters aren't at all discernable at that distance, same as in the screenshot, and with less luck I could have easily guessed wrong.
6444 x 3996 (160%) is what I actually ended up using after the initial test, as it's very difficult to even notice the tiny reduction in discernable detail, while framerate wise it becomes perfectly playable for me, tho that will naturally depend on what you're playing. I had no problems in main area, Longbow, Xortex and Secret Shop, but Slingshot was a bit borderline and had to be reduced down to around 3200 vertical pixels to achieve nice framerate. Tho in the end I still played Slingshot at 3996 as seeing all the details felt better than seeing them smoothly but less sharply.
For me 3600 is the lowest acceptable visual quality that still feels like 8KX, that shows the mindblowing amount of sharpness and detail that other headsets can't even come close to (ignoring non-consumer headsets and HP Reverb, as I have not tried them).
Another reason why screenshot is likely a better representation of what you'll see in VR than through the lens photo, is near complete lack of SDE.
SDE is only very slightly visible on bright things like fire of a
torch in Hellblade, but in most situations there's zero SDE and I just can't see it even if I try. You'll still see some aliasing from pixels in thin lines. For example in The Lab screenshot above, you can see the same thing in flatscreen
here and
here.
All this does not mean 8KX matches the limits human vision. For that I feel we'll need another doubling of resolution. But at this point, the amount of resolution 8KX provides is so awesome that we have enough resolution, and manufacturers should pursue HDR colors and brightness, oled blacks and such.
