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Emile comments on Question about brains and big numbers - Less Wrong
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A square inch would require much less number crunching than a whole scene in Avatar; there are also details that humans don't easily imagine right - the way light is reflected on a necklace, the way ambient light colors shadows, the way the skin ripples when muscles move underneath. Those things are expensive to compute, but your mind can get away with not imagining them right, and still think it looks "right".
This is probably right, but I would have to device a way on how to better estimate the precision with which a human brain can simulate a scene.
One could also look at how long it takes a modern supercomputer to simulate an inch of a frame minus some light details. Although I perceive my imagination to be much more photo realistic than a frame from the movie Avatar.
I don't think it's very meaningful to compare one's subjective impression of detail, and a computer rendering with too much precision; those are pretty different things.
The reasons for why I think humans are worse at imagining detail than they usually notice:
I like drawing, and often I could imagine something clearly, but when I tried to put it on paper I needed a lot of tried to get it right, if I managed to. Some things - expressions, folds in clothes, poses - are surprisingly difficult to get right, even when we see them all the time.
When playtesting the user interface of games, we sometimes ask the playtesters to draw what they saw on the screen. Often huge obvious stuff is missing, and sometimes they even draw things that weren't on the screen, and come from another game.
Those are just rough impressions, but I don't think it's useful to go much further than rough impressions on this specific topic.
p.s.: it's "devise", not "device"