guanophobic

Kingdom. The expansion that came out earlier this year is really fucking good. My biggest "just one more turn" game this year, and the year before it.

pre-alpha? sigh, I fucking give up.

People comparing a portable to a stationary system power wise is hilarious. You've got so many other factors at play here.

Battery consumption, heat, size and a touch screen. And as most of you've said, keeping the price at half of a PS4 pro or Scorpio.

I'm having an extended vacation over the coming weeks, and won't have much better to do but play Overwatch again.

Any EU duders wanna group up and grind some holdiay loot boxes? I'm guanophobic#2125, just add me!

Temporal Filtering

If you're interested in graphics technology, you've probably heard a lot of talk about "checkerboard rendering" in relation to the PlayStation 4 Pro in recent weeks. This new, upgraded PlayStation 4 is promoted as being capable of 4K graphics, and given a lower-fidelity game it most certainly is. In high-fidelity games, however, it has to use a clever workaround called "checkerboard rendering" to achieve a higher-resolution image without tanking the framerate.

In simplified terms, checkerboard rendering upscales the resolution from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, and uses data from the previous frame to create new detailed pixels that fill in the blanks between the pixels that were upscaled, avoiding the blurriness that would otherwise occur. The result is then further improved with other techniques, and smoothed out with anti-aliasing.

This same principle was already achieved in a similar fashion in last year's Rainbow Six Siege, which introduced us to what Ubisoft calls "Temporal Filtering" (page 45-65). That first-take on the idea rendered the same number of depth samples as a full-resolution 1920x1080 picture, but only half the shaded samples, improving performance at the expense of image quality. This manifested as a reduction in the quality and visibility of Ambient Occlusion shadowing, increased shader aliasing, decreased lighting and shading fidelity, and a loss of fidelity on smaller game elements, such as leaves, grass, visual effects and minute pieces of geometry.

In the year since Ubisoft has greatly improved their implementation of the technique, avoiding almost all of the previously-observed pitfalls. Such is the level of improvement, in fact, and the performance of the game with Temporal Filtering enabled, you can increase the resolution from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 whilst simultaneously benefiting from a faster framerate and improved image quality. Take a look for yourself in our interactive comparisons below.

• A San Francisco hipster tech company, like the facebook office in GTA5. Hopefully the company run by the guy who did Helmut Kreuger facial reconstruction at Gama (Hokkaido).
• Stockholm based tech company, just as hipstery as the SF one.
• A disguised wine auction in China. Taking place at a moved french chateau filled with new money Chinese bragging about what they recently bought.
• Wikileaks-esque headquarters in Reykjavik, filled with paranoid conspiracy theorists.
• A super fancy "bug out" facility for the filthy rich in the Swiz alps or in the Rockies.
• A bigger cruise ship than the one in the training mission.
• An amish community, absolutely no technical gadgets allowed. Or they are allowed, and they all think it's a diety's work.
• An underground cyber-goth nightclub where people think others are LARPing the blade club scene

Converted to Android with the Oneplus 1, and cannot think to go back for a moment. Got a Oneplus 3 a couple of months ago, and only have one complaint. The back of it is too slippery for my hands, make sure to order a cover.

A sleeping phone with touch unlock is instant, and the memory leak issues could be 'solved' with the insane amount of ram in it.

You poor souls that voted Dragon Age...

I was about to write the same thing, great list!

@gaff: BFII?