Can PS4 Pro really deliver Destiny 2 at 4K?

[Administrator]

When Bungie announced PlayStation 4 Pro support for Destiny 2, there was much controversy about the studio's decision to scale up to 4K resolution, as opposed to targeting 60 frames per second gameplay. It's an ambitious decision, principally because we're looking at 4x increase to resolution with just 2.3x compute and an even more meagre boost to memory bandwidth. With the beta in hand, we can finally see how Bungie has implemented its 4K support - and whether that decision has paid off.
To cut to the chase, the evidence suggests that Destiny 2 does indeed produce a 2160p output - but telltale signs point towards checkerboard rendering or an offshoot of it to get there. At first glance, the results are impressive though, with standard pixel counting suggests full 4K resolution here, with no upscale blur. However, pixelisation artefacts around particles and areas of fast motion (the gun sights are in particular) resolve at a lower resolution. In general though, it's an effective technique and only extreme situations reveal that it's not actually a native 4K output. It's all the more impressive in action as Destiny also employs dynamic resolution scaling on the horizontal axis, the pixel count shifting from 3072x2160 to full-fat 3840x2160 depending on the intensity of the action.
As expected, the base PlayStation 4 version of the game runs at standard 1080p, just like the first game, so the leap from PS4 to Pro is significant - but there are noticeable limitations. Destiny 2 uses lower resolution buffers for alpha, volumetrics and depth of field. Now, this was also true of the original Destiny too, as the developer mentions in this presentation (slides 121 onwards) but steps were taken to minimise visible artefacts such as sawtooth edges when geometry collides with lower resolution alpha buffers. Such safeguards are less strictly enforced in the Destiny 2 beta, and it looks like both base PS4 and Pro use similar buffers here - the upshot being the disparity in resolution between the effects and the framebuffer itself is far more noticeable on Sony's 'super-charged' console.
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