PS4 Pro on Retrotink 4K :-)
What I find most fascinating on my Retrotink 4K is the HDMI-In. It makes you try things you never thought about before buying it. After getting crisp 720p with 3x integer scaling and nearest neighbor with old consoles like Xbox 360, I now tried the PS4 Pro. 🙂
Back then I bought the Pro when I still had a 1080p TV (my main motivation for the upgrade was PSVR). It looked like the games were still rendered at something like 2160p with checkerboard rendering or at 1440p and then were downscaled to 1080p. So you got some sort of super sampling. Games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Days Gone looked amazing that way, the anti-aliasing was perfect.
Then I got a 4K TV and the graphic quality kind of degraded because nearly no game on PS4 Pro rendered at native 3840x2160 and checkerboard rendering created ugly artifacts like little holes in hair and gras. Setting the console to 1080p also doesn’t look great because the stupid TV then bilinearly upscales it to 2160p and everything looks blurry.
Now with the Retrotink 4K I tried setting the PS4 Pro to 1080p and scaling it up to 2160p with 2x integer scaling and nearest neighbor.
The result is quite fascinating. Of course everthing looks a bit less detailed because you only have around half of the render resolution. But with the downsampling effect you don’t really notice it too much. The render quality itself is actually better. And games like Bloodborne or Until Dawn that never got a PS4 Pro 4K-upgrade also look sharper that way.
Now I wonder whether I should try the same with my PS5 to improve all those games that are full of FSR2 upscaler artifacts or quite low res from the beginning (e.g. Rise of the Ronin or Star Wars Outlaws). 😄 But losing 120 Hz (40 fps modes!) and VRR is probably a bit too much.