Sony have already made it clear that the majority of games on the PS4 Pro won’t run at native 4K, beyond a few special titles like The Last Of Us.
Upscaling is basically the middle ground between 1080p and native 4K, which will make older games look a lot better, but don’t expect it to be as mind-blowing as say, a powerful graphics card hooked up to a 4K resolution monitor. These methods will inevitably change how we view games, and hopefully push towards 4K being the industry standard from then on! Microsoft’s ‘Project Scorpio’ has claimed to render all first party games at a native 4K, which will be a great selling point for the console. When you play games that support native 4K, you’re getting the real deal. To put things into perspective, when you play games upscaled to 4K on your PS4 Pro or Xbox One S, you’re getting an interpolated, stretched 1080p rather than a native 4K resolution. The PS4 Pro and Xbox One S use an updated version of this upscaling method called Checkerboard upscaling, which means that the image will look even better. The algorithm works by compromising these 3 artifact types to create a standardized image which looks better, but in the long run, does not compare at all to the native resolution. These can make the image more blurry or blocky and create Halo artifacts, which blow out the colors and make the image look poor. Interpolation is not perfect and often creates problematic artifacts in the image. This sounds great, and will make the image look better, but comes at a distinct cost. However, the way the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro capitalize on this is through upscaled interpolated resolutions, interpolation being an algorithmic function that essentially makes educated guesses where the pixels should be by averaging those found in the vicinity and inserting where needed. This is because you’re looking at the natural or ‘native’ resolution of the image, not stretching it out. It’ll look better, but if you find the same image at a native 4k resolution, where it hasn’t been altered, it will look far more detailed. Now take it into paint and resize it to 4K. A good way to look at it is like, take an image to use as your desktop background from Google at 1080p. This technology is coming very soon for console gaming, with the Scorpio offering true native 4K, and the PS4 Pro supporting native for a few select games. This of course, looks very different to ‘Native 4K’, which would require more power as it is the native resolution. Upscaling is where we take the native 1080p resolution and stretch it to 4K. It’s not yet cheap enough to be the standard, and that’s why the PS4 Pro/ Xbox One S are using a process called ‘Upscaling.’
This is of course a very luxury technological advantage, only really available for those with a very powerful PC gaming rig, as well as a capable 4K monitor.