next on the list of things that apparently I need to explain resolution
what is it why is it important it's become a much hotter topic than usual
because of a quote from the Ubisoft blog justifying their use of a lower than
1080p resolution in Watchdogs that reads as follows resolution is a number just
like frame rate is a number all those numbers are valid aspects of making
games but you make choices about the experience you want to deliver in our case dynamism is everything so for that
reason I will focus on the role resolution plays for gamers more and L
on the role it plays for photographers and movie Buffs although much of this
will also be applicable to those folks the term resolution is used to describe
the finess or detail in an image it
quantifies how close lines can be to each other and still be visually
differentiated from each other by the I there are actually lots of different
ways to measure resolution but they all boil down to this add an equal distance
given two same sized and otherwise equivalent images the higher resolution
one will look sharper clearer more true to life and just generally better to a
point first there's the requirement that all links in the chain the content the
software and the display need to be capable of the resolution you're trying
to achieve or you'll only realize the capabilities of the weakest link and
second is that there's actually an upper limit to what your eye itself can
resolve anyway the marketing term that Apple coined for this is Retina you can
actually learn more about how they calculate that in the video that we made
here and this is where things start to get a little bit tricky on that retina
calculator you see three values the pixel count of your display the size of
your display and the distance from which you'll normally view it so you could
have a 1080p display that delivers an image so fine you can't see the
individual pixels and a different 1080p display with an effective resolution so
low you might as well go back to playing Atari because it's so big or you're so
close to it you see maybe you be soft on their blog how a point 1080p is just a
number the perceived quality of your content depends on much more than
whether it runs at 1920x 1080 pixels versus 1280 by 720 or whatever else the
distance and screen size factors are just the tip of the iceberg 2 what about
color depth or frame rate what about visual effects that we can turn on if we
use up less of our Graphics processor's horsepower to push more pixels the one
you're looking at right now is a bit of an embellished example here but hopefully you see my point so yeah all
of these things are important too so why do we fixate on wanting gains to run at
1080P or higher so much well the answer is that on a typical flat screen TV at a
normal viewing distance a 1080p pixel count has a reasonably fine resolution
one that most people will find tolerable and running less than that has a couple
of undesirable effects number one is that it makes curved and diagonal lines
look blockier and less sharp which draws the user's attention to the fact that
they're looking at a digital simulation rather than a real image and number two
goes back to to that chain I was talking about before if one part of the chain
let's say your Xbox can't handle the pixel count of the others let's say the
game and your TV instead of getting a pixel by Pixel Perfect representation of
what the image was supposed to look like some approximations are being made these
approximations are called interpolation and if you want to know what that does
to image quality go ahead set your display right now to something other
than its native res and see what it looks like yuck so there you have it
resolution might be only one determining Factor when we're evaluating visual
quality and it might just be a number but it's a really important number
because a high resolution simple scene can look great I mean look at look at
Nintendo's graphics on the Wii U but even the best looking the best image in
the world can be easily ruined by lowering the resolution too much because
you can't see the details in the image anyway speaking of detailed images
shutter stock we absolutely love shutter stock around here I actually found out
I'm supposed to be getting a free account as part of this sponsorship deal
and it hasn't been happening and honestly even if the paperwork doesn't
get sorted out and I keep having to pay I'm going to keep using it even though
it's over $200 a month if you're a content creator or really anyone who
needs to be able to quickly and easily find high resolution royalty-free images
and video for integration into other content Shutterstock is fantastic they
have a ton of different plans all the way from just buying a couple of images at a time to Enterprise grade ones that
let you broadcast on TV and stuff we save so much time that our account pays
for itself easily we just grab the images we like embed them in our videos
then proceed to not sit around worrying if we're going to get a YouTube strike
for using someone else's content without an appropriate license and if you decide
to give Shutterstock a try today we've got a 20% off code for you Techquickie
614 give it a try it really is awesome
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so