Gadgetory

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 the lower than 1080p resolution and watchdogs that reads as follows resolution is a number just like framerate 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 less 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 finest or detail in an image it quantifies how closed lines can be to each other and still be visually differentiated from each other by the eye there are actually lots of different ways to measure resolution but they all boil down to this add an equal distance given to 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 coin 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 can 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 Ubisoft on their blog had a point 1080p is just a number the perceived quality of your content depends on much more than whether it runs at 1920 by 1080 pixels versus 1280 by 720 or whatever else the distance and screen size factors are just the tip of the iceberg - what about color death or framerate what about visual effects that we can turn on if we use up less of our graphics processors 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 - so why do we fixate on one and 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 block here and less sharp which draws the users attention to the fact that they're looking at a digital simulation rather than a real image and number two goes back 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 in 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 yeck 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 shutterstock we absolutely love shutterstock 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 you podcast 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 tech quickie 614 give it a try it really is awesome thanks for checking out this episode of fast as possible don't forget to subscribe for more videos just like this on tech quickie like this video if you liked it dislike it if you dislike to leave a comment if you have anything to say about resolution or our videos or my hair or who knows ponies I don't care you can believe a comment with whatever you want I'm if that's YouTube confidence I can't control what you put in there so I could let me tell you happy you wouldn't be allowed to comment at all so