Ordered Dithering is Useful and Good
· 3 min read
Dithering is the old trick of using patterns to fake more colors than you actually have. If you've ever noticed the crosshatch pattern in old video games, that's ordered dithering. It uses a repeating grid called a Bayer Matrix. It's carefully constructed so that adjacent values are as far apart as possible, which maximally spreads error. Modern game developers, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that this mathematical perfection is a problem to be fixed. The regular pattern is too noticeable, they say. Instead they make a fancy precomputed texture that has the same properties but with no regular pattern: Blue Noise.