Whichever of our esteemed colleagues in the games industry coined the word 'bullshot' deserves a knighthood. The term – a combination of a curse word and 'screenshot' – refers to the practice of publishers releasing images not wholly representative of their games. Indeed, during the PlayStation 3 era particularly, it was common for companies to dress up their games with images rendered at a much higher resolution than last-gen consoles could ever cope with, before scaling them back down. This led to the pictures looking much cleaner than what you'd ever actually see on your screen.

It wasn't always nefarious – print magazines obviously required assets at much higher resolutions simply due to the nature of the medium itself – but it was often misleading. Whether it was Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, or even Grand Theft Auto, it wasn't uncommon for publishers to put out screenshots which were devoid of the jaggies, blurring, and general image quality issues that you'd see at home. And yet the impending release of the PlayStation 4 Pro is about to make 'bullshots' the norm for those of you who pick up the supercharged machine.

Horizon Zero Dawn PS4 PlayStation 4 1

There's been much discussion about what the new console has to offer for those with 1080p televisions, and the most obvious answer is supersampling. But what does this mean? Well, let's use an analogy: have you ever taken a photograph on a digital camera or smartphone, only to find it quite grainy when viewed at full-resolution on your computer screen? What's the first thing that you do? You zoom out a bit, and the quality of the picture improves the smaller that you make it on the screen. This is more or less what the PS4 Pro is going to do.

There's no doubt that those of you sticking with a 1080p screen will reap the very real benefits of supersampling

Take a game like Horizon: Zero Dawn. It's going to look gorgeous on the standard PS4, but as with any game, there will be aliasing issues that cause jaggies and other issues on the screen. But when you play it on the PS4 Pro on a 1080p screen, what you're going to see is a near 4K image then scaled back down to HD resolution, resulting in pin-sharp image quality across the board. It's exactly what a publisher would do when creating a bullshot, but it's going to be rendered in real-time on your television screen.

Now there are other effects and features that certain games may take advantage of – better textures, improved anisotropic filtering, and more advanced effects – but this ability to render at a higher resolution and then scale back down is going to result in some of the cleanest images that you've ever seen. And while, yes, those with 4K televisions are really going to see the difference, there's no doubt that those of you sticking with a 1080p screen will reap the very real benefits of supersampling. Jaggies be gone!

Were you aware about the benefits of supersampling? Will you be using your PS4 Pro with a 1080p television screen? Scale down in the comments section below.