8k resolution... max or compatibility?

General Off Topic
1

For 8k, do folks prefer maximum resolution (8192x4096) or the “standard”/“backward compatible” 7680x3840 resolution that many studios use and leaves a bit of headroom for the headset, performance wise?

I’ve been doing my upscales to 3840p for some time based on old versions of the Quest software that struggled with 4096p in high bitrate files, but apparently it’s listed as supported now… Just curious y’alls feelings about it…

  • 7680x3840 (3840p)
  • 8192x4096 (4096p)
0 voters
2

Personally I’ve never even reflected about the reason for different resolutions. As long as it’s encoded as h.265 I’m good.

3

Its worth to consider the target:

3840p is ment to be able to display the entire screen at once without any stretching. Just like 4k on TVs are supposed to be. And thats why movies use this.

For VR however, it generaly isnt going to use the entire frame and isntead crop to whatever you are looking at. And in that case higher is better.

Since you are targeting for the quest (so VR), higher is generaly better.

And on another note, even if its not VR, cropping a 4096p video to 3840p is often still a viable thing to do if quality is more important than having the entire screen. Videos that arent ment for VR most likely have a ‘border’ of effectively contentless video that is just used for these cropping purposes while also enabling higher resolutions.
This is exactly what they were doing with 21:9 ratio videos already. Tvs only displaying 19:6 means 2 borders on the side that will never be relevant. Its nice they are there, but as they want to be compatible for both, they just are used as ‘filler’ for immersion.

So yes, unless there is some UI effect at the edges of the screen, always go for the highest possible. Cropping is easier to do than to scaling it up later

4

Thank you both for your replies! It seems the resounding answer is 4096p. Ill be moving my future upscales to that resolution. Thanks very much!