Digital Foundry is not talking about an element that is quite obvious:
Many elements in the image are in low-res. These are not mipmap differences. We can clearly see that it's low-res in the screen space at the shader level.
It looks a lot like VRS 3x3.
This raises a lot of questions. Microsoft is the only one to speak intently of native 4K to market these games. They are the only ones to put this notion of "native" forward, whereas this notion no longer has any meaning as the image compositions are so complex and composite.
It would be pretty comical if Microsoft were overselling native 4K on these games when they heavily use VRS.
The VRS is the same approach as the dynamic resolution, one is temporal, the other is spatial, but it is the same objective in the end: to reduce the resolution to distribute the load (the VRS offering just more freedom).
Except that dynamic 4K is not used to inject 720p behind.
It would be absurd that a game that injects 720p everywhere in the image via the VRS could be labeled "native 4K" while a dynamic resolution game that goes down to 1440p cannot.
As long as you use VRS, the "native 4K" label shouldn't have its place (a label that doesn't make sense anyway).
Today, the most relevant is to see the overall quality of the result on the screen.
The question that remains is: is this really VRS 3x3 or some other technique? Or a mixture of several things?
Source : Quaz51 / Upsilandre