Comment by nh23423fefe
19 hours ago
It can't be 4x increase because the additional information will be correlated and predictable.
if i render a linear gradient at increasingly higher resolutions, I certainly am not creating infinite information in the continuum limit obviously
4x is the upper bound. On average across all of gaming the information gain is going to be much more pedestrian, but where the extra information is not predictable it does make a big impact. For some pixels you do get the full 4x increase and those are the exact pixels for which you needed it the most.
You still don't get the 4X increase on those pixels. You get it compressed down to a blended by coverage estimation of elements within the pixel. With a 4x higher res display instead of 4x MSAA or 4x SSAA you get more info in that area because you preserve more spatial aspects of the elements of it, instead of just coverage aspects.
Ok let's try this. In this scenario you have access to a channel with up to 4x more information than what you otherwise would have access to. Exactly how the information is sampled is application specific and will introduce variability into the final result.
If we want to get very pedantic, the information gain per pixel could actually be far more dramatic than 4x under any super sampling strategy. Assume a pathological case like a very dark room where 100% render scale doesn't have a single pixel that picks up the edge of a prop in a corner. At higher render scale maybe you start to get a handful of pixels that represent the feature. Even if you blend these poorly, you still get better than nothing. Some might argue that going from zero information to any information at all represents an infinite gain.
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