There is far too much fanboying and not enough TECH going on in this thread. I'm about to change this.
Every since the first DF thread on The Order, there have been a lot of arguments going on about the relative "sharpness" of its image quality. Since I like discussing technical aspects with a solid technical foundation, I thought it would be very useful to have some sort of objective metric for "sharpness".
Before going into what I came up with, I'd like to remark that sharpness is not, in and of itself, a virtue. It's only one factor in IQ, and a very sharp picture can also suffer from terrible spatial and temporal aliasing.
That out of the way, what is sharpness really? I'd argue that it makes sense to define the "sharpness" of an image by the amount of high-frequency detail it shows. Or, to put it more accurately, the amount of high-frequency detail in an image is indicative of its sharpness, as with low sharpness you also can't get any high-frequency detail.
Based on this idea, I've written a very simple Matlab script which illustrates the Fourier transform of images. You can read these like this, somewhat simplified: low-frequency (large-scale) image artifacts will cause higher values towards the center, and the closer you get to the image borders the higher frequencies you see.
As an initial test, I wanted to see if this type of illustration gives any important information in a scenario which is rather clear. Therefore, I chose two equivalent screenshots from DF's comparison of the Ryse PC and XB1 versions. One of those renders at 1080p, the other at 900p while upsampling, and they are almost exactly equivalent otherwise.
Ryse XB1
Ryse PC
As you can see, the absolute magnitude of the FFT is significantly higher further out towards the edges for the PC version, indicating its higher level of fine-grained detail visible due to the higher rendering resolution. This is a good result for my methodology, I'd say.
However, Ryse on PC rendering at native resolution (without downsampling) is still not a game anyone would call particularly "sharp". It uses lots of postprocessing and rather heavy AA. Therefore, as a really really sharp (almost "too sharp") baseline, I tested the script on an old Oblivion screenshot, I had, with no postprocessing AA (only MSAA and sharp downsampling).
Downsampled Oblivion with MSAA
Well, that's that.
So now, how does The Order fare? The following is one of 3 screenshots I tried, which looked quite similar in their overall impression in the frequency magnitude space -- this is the most representative of the 3.
The Order 1886
Based on this, my conclusion is that The Order 1886 is sharper than 900p Ryse on XB1, slightly less sharp than Ryse at 1080p on PC, and a lot less sharp than rendering without postprocessing / post-AA (duh!).
Very interesting. Can You test those shots too? Those are different IQ settings, upsampled/downsampled/native/with and without TAA, from the same area.
http://kkrt.minus.com/mba3lKkTL8oNCE