The advent of resolution scaling in PC games

[DarklordKyo]

As many a member of the Master Race probably knows by now, certain games (namely, Street Fighter V, and Doom 2016) have begun using a graphics option called Resolution Scaling. For the five or so not in the know, it's an option that allows you to change the rendering resolution of a game (i.e., if you have a 1080p monitor, and you need it to run at a lower resolution, but don't want windowed mode, you can lower the actual rendered resolution by a bit).

I recently played the demo for Akiba's Trip (not too bad BTW, recommend it for any anime fan who want something like a more animesque Dead Rising), and, using the AkibaInterceptor tool, I lowered the game's rendering resolution to run it at 60 FPS (which the tool allows, with a few catches) while fitting the 720p game within the scale of my 1080p monitor (I don't know why I can't run what was originally a Vita & PS4 game at anything higher than 45 FPS at 1080p when my machine can run Mad Max at 1080p 60 for the most part, but ehh, that's life).

That said, since resolution scaling is a thing, how long do you doods think till devs start taking things to the logical conclusion? How long do you think separating display and rendering resolutions will become a more common thing in PC releases? (and I don't mean Resolution scaling as it is, I mean separate options that allow you to, for example, designate 1080p as what you want on your screen, but 720p as what it actually runs at).

For anyone who stumbles upon this thread, while you think about your response, please enjoy what I like to call the Maximum Nanashi [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsPaQbuzv2w&t=28m17s].

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Dragon Age Inquisition has this option. And one of those Metro games, I think the second one. It's a rare but good option to have. How likely is it that other devs will adopt it is impossible to tell. I think this should exist on consoles as well. Some console gamers would probably prefer to play at 900p or even 720p at 60fps rather than 1080p at 30fps. There's virtually no difference between 900p and 1080p when you sit far enough from the screen as most console gamers do, but it can add at least another 15fps to your game. I don't know about you but I'd take 40-45fps over 30fps any day.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

As many a member of the Master Race probably knows by now, certain games (namely, Street Fighter V, and Doom 2016) have begun using a graphics option called Resolution Scaling. For the five or so not in the know, it's an option that allows you to change the rendering resolution of a game (i.e., if you have a 1080p monitor, and you need it to run at a lower resolution, but don't want windowed mode, you can lower the actual rendered resolution by a bit).

I recently played the demo for Akiba's Trip (not too bad BTW, recommend it for any anime fan who want something like a more animesque Dead Rising), and, using the AkibaInterceptor tool, I lowered the game's rendering resolution to run it at 60 FPS (which the tool allows, with a few catches) while fitting the 720p game within the scale of my 1080p monitor (I don't know why I can't run what was originally a Vita & PS4 game at anything higher than 45 FPS at 1080p when my machine can run Mad Max at 1080p 60 for the most part, but ehh, that's life).

That said, since resolution scaling is a thing, how long do you doods think till devs start taking things to the logical conclusion? How long do you think separating display and rendering resolutions will become a more common thing in PC releases? (and I don't mean Resolution scaling as it is, I mean separate options that allow you to, for example, designate 1080p as what you want on your screen, but 720p as what it actually runs at).

For anyone who stumbles upon this thread, while you think about your response, please enjoy what I like to call the Maximum Nanashi [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsPaQbuzv2w&t=28m17s].

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means, since I have not played a PC game with "resolution scaling" on the PC but isn't that something that console games already do? I mean, I have a 1080p TV and very few of last gen's games actually ran in 1080p simply because consoles weren't powerful enough to handle them, but the games still ran on my TV without borders or anything like that.

Honestly never thought about doing that with PC games before just because on my laptop I sat close enough to the screen that lowering the resolution would have bothered me immensely, and my current PC is powerful enough that I don't need to worry about running games at a lower resolution to hit 60fps.

Anyway, I guess this is good news for anyone with an older graphics card that wants to put off upgrading.

 

[Bad Jim]

Seems like an odd thing to have in a full screen sort of game like Doom, since you can get almost exactly the same effect by selecting a lower resolution. However, it is a good idea for the sort of games you play windowed, because if you have an 8k monitor and a demanding game, you might only be able to play it in a tiny window without a scaling option.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

So if I understand this correctly, resolution scaling basically just makes the game fullscreen but the actual render area itself is only a portion of the screen? For example, if my monitor is 1080p, and the game runs at 720p, then the game will only take up part of the screen and the rest would be ... a black backdrop, or something? I really don't get the point. It sounds like windowed mode without the ability to have other windows open (on the same monitor, at least), but also fullscreen mode without the game taking up the full screen.

I guess it might be more efficient than simply lowing the resolution, since you're only updating a smaller part of the screen, but I really don't see the appeal.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means, since I have not played a PC game with "resolution scaling" on the PC but isn't that something that console games already do? I mean, I have a 1080p TV and very few of last gen's games actually ran in 1080p simply because consoles weren't powerful enough to handle them, but the games still ran on my TV without borders or anything like that.

Honestly never thought about doing that with PC games before just because on my laptop I sat close enough to the screen that lowering the resolution would have bothered me immensely, and my current PC is powerful enough that I don't need to worry about running games at a lower resolution to hit 60fps.

Anyway, I guess this is good news for anyone with an older graphics card that wants to put off upgrading.

Well, yes and no. Console games are locked to a specific resolution it renders at. What I'm asking is the ability to specifically change what resolution it renders at separate from the screen size resolution.

 

[DarklordKyo]

So if I understand this correctly, resolution scaling basically just makes the game fullscreen but the actual render area itself is only a portion of the screen? For example, if my monitor is 1080p, and the game runs at 720p, then the game will only take up part of the screen and the rest would be ... a black backdrop, or something? I really don't get the point. It sounds like windowed mode without the ability to have other windows open (on the same monitor, at least), but also fullscreen mode without the game taking up the full screen.

I guess it might be more efficient than simply lowing the resolution, since you're only updating a smaller part of the screen, but I really don't see the appeal.

For what I'm talking about, it's not as much that as it is lowering what the resolution is without shrinking the entire window. For example, for people who don't like windowed mode, if they're willing to play with a blurry screen, they can have their screen at 1080p, but the game itself only renders 720p.

It's like how console versions of Assassin's Creed Unity are stuck at 900p even if the TV has a 1080p screen.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Seems like an odd thing to have in a full screen sort of game like Doom, since you can get almost exactly the same effect by selecting a lower resolution. However, it is a good idea for the sort of games you play windowed, because if you have an 8k monitor and a demanding game, you might only be able to play it in a tiny window without a scaling option.

Well, every time I personally chose a smaller resolution at fullscreen, there were errors with how the screen displays. Sometimes a portion of the screen is nothing but black (and not bars, I mean a black square in the corner), sometimes the interface gets leaked beyond the screen. What I'm talking about is the entire game being shown at whatever screen resolution you chose, just rendering less than it normally would at that rendering resolution (like how a gamecube game looks blurry on an HD TV for example).

 

[FirstNameLastName]

So if I understand this correctly, resolution scaling basically just makes the game fullscreen but the actual render area itself is only a portion of the screen? For example, if my monitor is 1080p, and the game runs at 720p, then the game will only take up part of the screen and the rest would be ... a black backdrop, or something? I really don't get the point. It sounds like windowed mode without the ability to have other windows open (on the same monitor, at least), but also fullscreen mode without the game taking up the full screen.

I guess it might be more efficient than simply lowing the resolution, since you're only updating a smaller part of the screen, but I really don't see the appeal.

For what I'm talking about, it's not as much that as it is lowering what the resolution is without shrinking the entire window. For example, for people who don't like windowed mode, if they're willing to play with a blurry screen, they can have their screen at 1080p, but the game itself only renders 720p.

It's like how console versions of Assassin's Creed Unity are stuck at 900p even if the TV has a 1080p screen.

So it doesn't decrease the size of the image, just renders it at a lower resolution and essentially stretches it to fit the whole screen? In other words, you're talking about changing the resolution, a feature that every single PC game bar perhaps some extremely niche examples (lowest of low budget indie games, some games with 2D sprites) have had since a time long before I owned a PC advanced enough to even have USB ports?

 

[DarklordKyo]

So it doesn't decrease the size of the image, just renders it at a lower resolution and essentially stretches it to fit the whole screen? In other words, you're talking about changing the resolution, a feature that every single PC game bar perhaps some extremely niche examples (lowest of low budget indie games, some games with 2D sprites) have had since a time long before I owned a PC advanced enough to even have USB ports?

Well, every time I just changed the resolution and left it at fullscreen, it introduced display errors. For example, if I do so with Witcher 2, there's a giant, black block in the corner of the screen. Likewise, when that recent Ghost in the Shell game didn't initially render at 1080p, some of the stuff went beyond the border of the screen.

I mean separating the display resolution and rendering resolution so that stuff like that doesn't happen (and, if you're willing to do the trade, the only visual problems are a blurry, stretched screen). It would also have the added perk of native downsampling if your rig can handle it.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

So it doesn't decrease the size of the image, just renders it at a lower resolution and essentially stretches it to fit the whole screen? In other words, you're talking about changing the resolution, a feature that every single PC game bar perhaps some extremely niche examples (lowest of low budget indie games, some games with 2D sprites) have had since a time long before I owned a PC advanced enough to even have USB ports?

Well, every time I just changed the resolution and left it at fullscreen, it introduced display errors. For example, if I do so with Witcher 2, there's a giant, black block in the corner of the screen. Likewise, when that recent Ghost in the Shell game didn't initially render at 1080p, some of the stuff went beyond the border of the screen.

Then it sounds like what you're actually talking about is a bug free implementation of this feature, since what you've just described are bugs, not intended features.
Trust me, resolution scaling has been a standard part of PC gaming since before I owned a PC.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Internal resolution vs rendering resolution. Ideally, games should be rendered at the monitor's native resolution. But the resolution of internal buffers can set higher (supersampling) or lower than the monitor's resolution. This has some advantages. HUD elements can be rendered at native while the game's visuals can be rendered at a lower resolution to increase performance. Call of Duty games since Ghosts have supported this.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Resolution scaling in the game options, definitely a good idea.


What I'd personally like to see though is more games having resolution scaling options that go over 100%, because SSAA. (yes there is DSR but iirc that doesn't work on games that are not exclusive fullscreen without effectively implimenting DSR on your desktop, and not all games offer an exclusive fullscreen option)

 

[demoman_chaos]

For those that don't understand, a simple way to look at Resolution Scaling is that you set the game into a windowed mode then full-screen that. Let's say your screen is 1280x720 pixels, you set the "windowed mode" resolution to 640x480, then full-screen the 640x480 rendering.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Then it sounds like what you're actually talking about is a bug free implementation of this feature, since what you've just described are bugs, not intended features.
Trust me, resolution scaling has been a standard part of PC gaming since before I owned a PC.

and a possible way to iron that out is to separate display resolution and rendering resolution, make them separate options for the player to change as they please

 

[DarklordKyo]

Resolution scaling in the game options, definitely a good idea.


What I'd personally like to see though is more games having resolution scaling options that go over 100%, because SSAA. (yes there is DSR but iirc that doesn't work on games that are not exclusive fullscreen without effectively implimenting DSR on your desktop, and not all games offer an exclusive fullscreen option)

built in downsampling?, that would be nice

 

[DarklordKyo]

For those that don't understand, a simple way to look at Resolution Scaling is that you set the game into a windowed mode then full-screen that. Let's say your screen is 1280x720 pixels, you set the "windowed mode" resolution to 640x480, then full-screen the 640x480 rendering.

thank you for simplifying the concept

 

[MercurySteam]

See when I see a thread about 'resolution scaling' on PCs, I instantly think of someone rendering at game at 1440p then downsampling it to 1080p, or using SSAA to achieve a sismilar thing. I believe that as long as you can turn it on/off I don't see the huge issue. I know that Overwatch lets you render the game at 2x+ of the native resolution so seems fair that some games would implement the other direction. I mean it probably looks awful but as long as you can disable it then more power to them.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Then it sounds like what you're actually talking about is a bug free implementation of this feature, since what you've just described are bugs, not intended features.
Trust me, resolution scaling has been a standard part of PC gaming since before I owned a PC.

and a possible way to iron that out is to separate display resolution and rendering resolution, make them separate options for the player to change as they please

I don't think there's really any need for that. I can't remember the last time I've ever played a game where the resolution scaling had any bugs, so it seems more like you've been incredibly unlucky, as opposed to this being a common problem that needs to be addressed.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

You are changing internal buffer sizes. Emulators have done this for years. Suppose a game renders at 440x400 natively. Instead of rendering the game at 1920x1080, you render the game into a 880x800 buffer (2x native) and scale it to an 1920x1080 with aspect ratio correction, so it renders in 4:3, or 16:9 if the game supports it. This has certain advantages in an emulation context since the game's visuals may break if rendered at a resolution which isn't an integer scale of native.

In PC games, the UI elements can be rendered at native monitor resolution while the game graphics are rendered at a resolution higher or lower than native. UI elements are generally not designed to be rendered at oddball resolutions because this causes blurring. It's the same basic principle as post-processing AA methods like SMAA, where the HUD is rendered separately to the game's graphics. The SMAA filter is applied to the game's main buffer, and then the HUD is overlaid, preventing the HUD from being blurred.