So I got me a PS4 Pro today even though I was not all that impressed by the original PS4 3 years ago. But Steam and PC Games in general, while perfectly playable on my HDTV rig, have in general annoyed me with very patchy controller support even for the console port games. How a game like Nier: Automata can have "Only partial" Controller Support on Steam, while having a PS4 Version is beyond me... lazyness by the dev, outsourced to a lazy dev for the PC port, technical limitations?

But I digress. So I was not too keen on the machine itself... I mean its a well designed system, and for all hardware crammed in 400 bucks is a good price, still, compared to my fat PS3 the physical system looks way less nice. And I am not talking about shiny piano black surfaces, not a fan of those... but damn, that PS4 Pro casing looks cheap!

Then I turn the thing on, and while being quite impressed by the detail crammed into the vistas visible in the first few minutes of Horizon: Zero Dawn, I notice something I know all too well from the PS3: Jaggies all over the screen. Either there is no AA whatsoever like in the good old PS3 days, and the devs just had no processing power to spare on AA even on the still not too impressive PS4 Pro chip even when rendering 1080p... or they are using inefficient crap like FXAA because probably the game is using deferred rendering, and good AA methods like downsampling would smoke even the PS4 Pros GPU. In that case, the jaggies probably are caused by the specular highlights (which have caused bad aliasing in about all engines I ever worked in), and transparent/cutout shaders used for foliage, which is the star of the show in Horizon Zero Dawn... besides the Robots, of course.

Either way, I guess I will get used to the Jaggies like I got used to the Jaggies in the PS3 games... still disappointed that the ONLY thing I really wanted to see upgraded in the graphically better PS3 games is still a problem in 2017 (ignoring the 720p resolution and Framerate for now).

Somebody on this forum mentioned once that the checkerboard rendering used for getting Pseudo-4k from the PS4 Pro would make for a pretty good AA method as a sideeffect. Having seen that AA indeed is still not that good (or absent) in some games on the PS4 Pro, I am interested if upgrading to a 4k TV and using the checkerboard rendering might reduce the jaggies similarly to what true AA (Downsampling or high Multisampling settings) does on the PC.

Does it help against specular aliasing and with cutout shader jaggies? Or does it fail there like so many of the less performance hungry AA methods?

Yes, I know 4k in itself does improve image quality and yadda yadda... I have a 4k screen for my PC and know from expierience that while it does that, it does NOT make aliasing less of a problem. It helps a little bit, but without good AA on screens the sizes of TVs the aliasing is still visible even in 4k.

And yeah, might sound a little bit mindboggling that I would even think about upgrading the TV just for that but... I am planning to move to a 4k TV within 2 years anyway, and have set aside some money to upgrade my Speaker system as my crappy old 5.1 system is breaking down. Add to that that the 2016 LG OLED TVs have come down a LOT in prices, and I might actually consider pulling the trigger on one of this if I get it for a very good price (since the 2016 sets actually got pretty good ratings). Might bridge me over again until real HDR Sets with 10'000 nits of peak brightness become available, and actually affordable ;)

But really, if all checkerboard rendering does is increase resolution a little without really solving the aliasing issues, I might give my ears a better expierience with a better sound system and stay on a non-HDR 1080p TV for now.

Anyone that has expierience with how the PS4 Pro or games like HZD look on a 4k Screen with checkerboard rendering able to give me some input?

The higher your resolution, the higher the spatial frequency, hence the perceived aliasing should increase.

The other way around, surely? The space being sampled stays the same, whereas the sampling rate increases.

Rainbow Six seige uses checkerboard rendering on PC if I'm not mistake, to achieve 1920*1080 output from a 960*540 2xMSAA shading buffer! They don't use it for AA/super-sampling though -- they use temporal AA for that.
As for specular aliasing and alpha-cut-outs... everyone should be using pre-filtering to reduce specular aliasing, and when possible, OIT/alpha-blending solves the alpha cut out problem.

Using MSAA solves those things very well. Do we need programmable subsample positions for this? Is there finally API support for that on PC? I thought it's still console only. (Guess one could use a half pixel offset between frames for an alternative, but this works only if we know which GPU usses which positions.)

The slides say that the resolve pass adds about 1.4ms, but the whole stuff still saves around 8-10ms, which is kind of awesome. (Ever since I first saw the slides describing how they do this, I'm toying with the idea of implementing it in my hobby renderer, but the resolve shaders flow graph, and the fact that they admit their implementation was done by trial and error, scares the hell out of me.)

Woah, that is quite the wealth of information.

So I guess the consensus is that while checkerboard rendering and a 4k screen MIGHT improve aliasing in case of PS4 Pro games, its not a good AA method by itself, and highly dependend on how the game implements it, right?

Guess I will hold off spending cash on a 4k TV until one really reaches the sweetspot of OLED, bright enough HDR and around 2000$ cost. And live with some Aliasing in 1080p PS4 games for now.

Well, should get more PS4 games in the mail tomorrow, will see if its a general problem of the PS4 or just the fault of the Guerilla Games devs that Horizon Zero Dawn looks so Jaggy. Probably the latter... shame really, the game looks quite good else.