"For us, we've always tried to hit native resolution because we want to have surface valuations happening per pixel, because we have these hard, clean edges," he explained. "Even at 4K we still have a little bit of aliasing, but that's the type of stuff that we get to work on heading into the future... I know there's other techniques and other people will want to use them for their quality decisions but for us, being able to get those little streaks of specular you'll get off the track. These are like pixel level things or sub-pixel levels things you'll kind of miss out on when you get into approximations that aren't running at native resolution."
Tector is the man behind a thousands GIFs - he is indeed the talking head on last year's Project Scorpio reveal video, discussing those now iconic 'uncompressed pixels'. In putting that video together, each participant sat down in turn in front of the camera, and were encouraged just to talk about Scorpio and their experiences of its development. It's fair to say that the subsequent editing robbed his comments of almost all of their context.
"It's what I was getting at when I said 'uncompressed pixels'. Even when you go to a movie at the theatre and it's projected at 4K, it's compressed and it's running at 24 frames a second," he says. "And games - just in general - games at 4K, they're natively rendered, right? They're the cleanest, uncompressed pixels that you can see and they're rendering at 60 frames a second - and the really cool part is that we're doing this for console gamers now. So rather than hoping you can afford a multi-thousand dollar PC that can achieve it, we're going to have people playing at console, native 4K, 60 frames a second. It's going to be awesome."
In effect, Tector is referencing the unique properties of 4K gaming - it's the only medium that can provide the cleanest presentation to an ultra HD screen. UHD Blu-rays, streaming media, even cinema digital projection - they are all based on sources using lossy compression. There is no compromised intermediate with gaming, everything is rendered directly from silicon to pixel. Turn 10 builds its titles around precision assets and the cleanest native rendering it can achieve within hardware constraints. The highest quality pixels? Well, the E3 demo's image quality is on another level.