Smooth out displacement/phong-like artifacts

[Remo]

Hi guys!
I was just playing around with the displacement and run into some issues!
There are appearing some kind of phong-like artifacts (img. 1) and I was wondering if there is a way to smooth those out...?!
Edit: Higher resoluted maps turn out like the img. 2 (8k)
Id appreciate every hint
Cheers, Remo

[tomabobu]

Hi Remo,

The artefacts that you are seeing are not caused by the resolution of the image but by the bit depth. An 8-bit image used as displacement will always create that stair-step effect.
I've attached an image with two screenshots: one example of an 8-bit and highly compressed texture used as displacement and another where I've taken the same texture, change it to 32bits in Photoshop and applied an gaussian blur with a radius of 3. It's obvious that the details will be blurred but you will smooth out the steps.

I hope this helps,
Bogdan