I’m going to be honest - a good deal of this flew over my head, but in essence this is about using “exotic” pixels that each contain one colour, two z values (which dictate where the pixel appears in 3D space), and two IDs (used to track the object). Most obviously, these pixels aren’t even square - each one is the width of two standard pixels.

These pixels allow colour to be calculated in twice the number of locations compared to 1080p, and the z values and ID are being calculated as if they were native 4K.

I’ve lost you, haven’t I? If I’m honest, I’ve lost myself, so here’s Mark Cerny’s own summation: “Checkerboard rendering makes edges super-crisp, like geometry rendering does, and on top of that it adds internal detail in a number of ways.”

To demonstrate, Cerny flicks another switch to add checkerboard rendering to the inFamous: First Light image that had already been sharpened by the geometry rendering. Not only was a further degree of crispness added, but the overall detail jumped massively. It was suddenly possible to make out individual teeth and the shading gradients in her eye makeup.

Of course, what really matters is how the games look in action, so as well as seeing these techniques layered on to a still image, Cerny demoed inFamous: First Light running in real-time on two displays: one at native 4K (the frame-rate had been lowered so it would actually run) and one using the Pro’s two rendering techniques. This is the demo I mentioned in the intro and I’m entirely serious - if I had been sitting at even a vaguely normal distance from the TV, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to spot the differences. Even a few inches from the screen (a top-of-the-range, 65in Sony ZD9) they were hard to find without Cerny’s help.

We played the same, extremely tricky game of spot-the-difference with upcoming bikers vs zombies adventure Days Gone, so while results will undoubtedly vary from game to game, it’s clear to me that when implemented well, the PS4 Pro’s geometry and checkerboard rendering techniques are capable of making games look so good that they’re practically indistinguishable from native 4K.

Crucially, implementing either of these rendering techniques is apparently quite straightforward. PlayStation supplies reference code for both, and Cerny says geometry rendering can be added in “a matter of days” by a single programmer, while that same programmer could implement checkerboard rendering in “typically a few weeks”. That means there’s no good reason for a developer to not take advantage of the extra power of the PS4 Pro, which is presumably why Sony feels justified in insisting on it for every PS4 game that’s released from this point forth.

That’s not to say that every studio is using those specific rendering techniques. Insomniac and Ubisoft, for example, are using a completely different approach for Spider-Man and For Honor respectively. It's called “temporal injection”, and Cerny himself admiringly describes it as “very sophisticated”.