I wasn't really disagree or agreeing, just expanding upon the issue of brands and panels.

It will always be a trade off on resolution and potential graphics/performance though. I mean Halo 5 for example on X1X pushed for dynamic 4K. But I would prefer a lower resolution and boost on other settings.

Temporal AA is becoming popular due to the low overhead but does make games look a bit soft, more so when below 1080p. That has been a bigger problem on the base X1.

I say 1080p with good AA is fine. Halo:MCC for example is 1080p with no AA and the jagggies make it look a bit rough even if its a vast improvment over the original.

That article over complicates things, yet the base of it is that 0.4 arc minute is the absolute maximum in the fovea.

0.4 arc minute translates to 150 pixel per degree. So a 4K tv with 3840 pixels can take up 25.6 degrees of your field of view if you have perfect vision. It's overkill though and you only get that 0.4 arc resolution at maximum contrast. 20/20 vision corresponds to 60 pixels per degree.

Diminishing returns in full effect

Test subjects were asked to tell which picture looked more real. As you can see it turns into guess work over 100 pixels per degree

Not sure what that means. My 1080p 40 inch was much cheaper by the way and a less notable brand. My Vizio is 50 inches and has quadruple the pixel count, Im saying the difference is relatively minor unless you're looking closely for differences.

But the objectively noticeable improvment is what the X1X does on any screen. The higher native resolution gets rid of jaggies, the increased graphics and performance is also significant. Hence, I didnt need a TV upgrade per se because the X1X was already fixing the flaws I could see on 1080p screen. The extra sharpness I'm getting the new TV is less significant.

I wonder if the difference seen makes a bigger difference if the assets are 4K. Which games actually use 4K assets and resolution. I would believe those games should show a much better difference in image quality.

That's how I tend to see it. 4k Isn't all that worthwhile to me, not until we start seeing 4k assets (not upressed) for everything. I've done 4k from 1080p and 1440p, and it doesn't make the 1080x sub 1080x assets looking any better. 

It's simpler and more complicated. The simple part is that if you have 4K x 4K texture assets available (for every texture in the game), getting them on-screen requires a patch to add those files to the local filesystem, whether that be PS4 / XB1 or PC. No changes to levels / etc need to be made. The complicated part is that there are compromises needed to be made to run at 4K output without blowing HW budgets. Deferred rendering uses 3-5 (or 8 if you're Infamous Second Son, at a whopping 41 bytes / pixel) screen-sized render targets, often 4 bytes a piece, read multiple times per frame. Those get heavy quickly in terms of processing time and memory bandwidth. Blow your bandwidth budget, and you don't make frame time or have to compromise on anti-aliasing. IMO, anti-aliasing is the next frontier in console graphics. I've read about an alternative to deferred shading called the visibility buffer. It's deferred but designed for high resolution displays. It's 2 render targets (12 bytes total) and quite a bit smaller than most deferred pipelines (16-20+), storing triangle references but no triangle attributes (color / normal / specular / roughness / etc.). MGSV is 4 render targets including depth, but it has to compromise and try to cram normals into 8 bits / channel when you want 10 or 11. You get artifacts from that, that AA can't totally resolve. It sucks and the visibility buffer solution has none of those problems. Even better, you get MSAA compatibility for free. With 4K being a thing, I think (and hope) that the Visibility Buffer wins out next-gen. We'll get better visuals at a smaller performance cost. That leaves more room for anti aliasing and newer / better rendering techniques.

See this for the gritty details on the Visibility Buffer.

http://www.conffx.com/Visibility_Buffer_GDCE.pdf

Point is neither X1X or the PRO are powerful enough to showcase 4k properly. We are still at least 3+ gpu generations away. So the current games don't showcase it either. Especially draw distance in open world games.  Comparing 1080p to 4k in console games is rather pointless due to the current hardware limitations. I game on pc and upgraded from a 37" 1080p to a 40"k tv 2 years ago. It is more noticeable on pc since you can crank up the graphics beyond default in many games. However, you should see the difference watching You Tube videos or movies in 4k or 8k downsampled to 4k which looks even better if you can stream 8k.

Yeah, I think next gen the hardware makers and developers will definitely take into account the likeliness that the majority of homes will not benefit hugely from Native 4k. Not everyone can afford or even wants to sit 5ft away from their 50" 4k TV. A checker boarding solution seems the best fit IMO. Supersample for the 1080p screens, offer a nice upgrade for the 4k screens but all whilst allowing GPU prowess to put on things which everyone will benefit from like VFX, lighting, FPS etc.

They could go the PC route and all next gen games will come in 2 performance modes. 1080p (Ultra GFX) and 4k (Mid-low GFX). My fear here is that one of the modes will be unoptimised, i.e the 1080p version wouldn't really utilise the underused GPU and devs will just increase the FPS.

Not really a valid argument you're making. But if your sentiment is modern games shouldn't be wasting resources on 4K, I can see your point.

We are in a world with 4K TVs and the premium consoles do provide content for that resolution, but its also a case of diminishing returns. I mean 1/4 the pixel count of 1080p looks like trash on a HD TV. While 1/4 of 4K is still a sharp picture.

4K video is going to look better primarily because its a higher bitrate. I mean a 720p video can look better than a 1080p video. YouTube 1080p video is pretty good quality but they're also trying to limit the bandwidth usage.