Hello all.

With the coming of the "4K"-capable consoles, namely the PS4Pro and the XB1X, there is one thing that caught my attention.
I watch a lot of Digital Foudry's videos, and in most games analyzed on the consoles above, there is heavy use of checkerboarding. Be it to get directly to 4K, or to get to 1440p/1800p to be then simply upscaled to 4K.

If I understood it correctly it's a form of "intelligent upscaling", or reconstruction from only half the pixels of the final image, disposed on a checkerboard pattern. Algorithms are then used to "guess" the remaining parts. Which is less taxing on hardware than full rendering.
All in all, I think it gets spectacular results. Of course it's not as crisp as a true 4K output, but it's a definite improvement over 1080p upscaled to 1440p or 4K, for example. And on a TV, that you watch from farther away than you would a monitor, the difference with proper 4K is supposedly very difficult to see.

Apparently, the hardware in both consoles is also optimized so that this operation is as light as it can be.

I have looked around, and it seems that some games of PC already use similar techniques to offer gameplay at greater resolution (Rainbow Six Siege and Quantum Break, for example).
I believe that having this ability more widely available on PC would be a good thing : after all, the PCMR is all about choice and possibilities, isn't it ?
You could use your 1080p GPU to game at 1440p or 4K, on a TV for example. Or on a monitor if the artefacts aren't too visible from up close. Or it could help in lowering the hardware requirements for VR.

Do you think possible that it'll spread ?
On a technical standpoint, do you believe it could be implemented on a driver-level by Nvidia and AMD, or would it be more related to the game engines ?
Do you want to see this happening ?
Would you use it, if you could ?

I'd love to hear your opinion on the subject !