What exactly does scaling do?

[vum]

I have played around with scaling today,i mostly use 100%,and i turned on 400% and i took pictures of them both,of trucks,cars,shadows i also took pictures up close of trees and other objects of the map. I cannot see a single difference other than trees being oversharpened when afar,but when you come close they aren't any different than 100% scaling,and shadows are only a extremly bit darker than 100%. I wouldn't expect a ton of FPS loss from this,but going from 100s to 20s? What the hell? this is not a rant on scs or hate post,i just want to know,what the hell does scaling do to achieve such high performance loss when all it does is oversharpen and darken some shadows?
BTW,i tried sharpening with reshade,and achieved the exact same results,or extremly similar,with around 5-10 FPS loss. Even more weird.

[ingosupercute]

Scaling increases the resolution in which objects of a game are being rendered. This is the highest level of stress one can put hardware under, which is why people who play in a native 4k resolution (for example 3840x 2160) got most load on their graphics cards, while people who play in full hd (1920x 1080) got more load on their CPU if playing at high frame rates.

I don't know what resolution you started at, but let's say you use 4k then at 200% render you would be playing in 8k. There are no systems running 8k resolutions at acceptable framerates on the normal market.

The second thing that comes into play is optimization. You may or may not often have read complaints on new graphic impressive games that they were not being well optimized. Developers have to invest a lot of time into making the standart resolutions their customers play at run smoothly. This can be achieved in a variety of ways for example the reduction of micro triangles within 3d objects (for some reason that is beyond my limited understanding computers get slowed down a lot if they have to render those). If you now raise your resolution beyond what was being optimized, you are basically leaving the path set up for you.

And lastly, the reason why you barely see any difference when you raise the resolution: As you noticed everything becomes sharper, it has a much higher polygon count. But the textures themselves remain the same that were originally coded into the game. Let's for example take a piece of armor in a fantasy roleplaying game: If you want it to look more detailed it does not help to increase the overall resolution, you need to install a mod where someone prepared a higher resolution mesh of said armor, which will obviously make the game run slower again when guards everywhere suddenly wear very detailed armor. For EuroTruck this means if the tree you are looking has the details of a bowl of mashed vegetables, then increasing its resolutions only makes it sharper, not more detailed.

~hope that helps~

[Wolfpig]

Originally posted by ingosupercute:

And lastly, the reason why you barely see any difference when you raise the resolution: As you noticed everything becomes sharper, it has a much higher polygon count. But the textures themselves remain the same that were originally coded into the game.

Who told you that stuff?
Scaling does not influence the poly count of objects.

It renders the picture in a higher resolution, and downscales it to the lower one to increase the sharpness of textures/improve the visible aliasing.

That is Btw. something you can do force trough your GPU driver on every game.

[BlunderingFool]

Originally posted by ingosupercute:

~hope that helps~ :nerov:

Don't take this the wrong way, but you know juuuuust enough about 3D rendering to be horribly wrong in just the right aspects. D=

Also, there's no such things "Micro triangles" and I'm honestly flabbergasted as to what that gibberish even means.

The game is made up of textures (Measured in pixels), applied to models (constructed of, and measured by, polygons) which make up the game world. When you render a 3D scene it has to be rasterised as a 2D representation for displaying on a screen, this is measured in pixels as a 2D image.

When you increase the rendering resolution scale you're increasing the size of that 2D image BEFORE it's scaled back down by the GPU and sent to your monitor.

[vum]

Originally posted by BlunderingFool:

Originally posted by ingosupercute:

~hope that helps~ :nerov:

Don't take this the wrong way, but you know juuuuust enough about 3D rendering to be horribly wrong in just the right aspects. D=

Also, there's no such things "Micro triangles" and I'm honestly flabbergasted as to what that gibberish even means.

The game is made up of textures (Measured in pixels), applied to models (constructed of, and measured by, polygons) which make up the game world. When you render a 3D scene it has to be rasterised as a 2D representation for displaying on a screen, this is measured in pixels as a 2D image.

When you increase the rendering resolution scale you're increasing the size of that 2D image BEFORE it's scaled back down by the GPU and sent to your monitor.

so what you're saying is my gpu is scaling everything down and thats why i don't see a difference? Sorry if those are dumb questions,but i am terribily curious why my performance loss is so drastic and theres nothing but oversharpening that's happening.
If it helps,i am playing on a 16:10 2560x1600 165hz laptop display,with an i5-12500h and a RTX 3060 Mobile gpu with 6gb VRAM.

[citelis730]

Not sure what you see on your system but the difference at the image quality between 100% and 400% scaling is huge. Personally i find the game entirely unplayable on anything below 300% on 1440p.

[maxcry]

Originally posted by vum:

... snip ...
so what you're saying is my gpu is scaling everything down and thats why i don't see a difference? Sorry if those are dumb questions,but i am terribily curious why my performance loss is so drastic and theres nothing but oversharpening that's happening.
If it helps,i am playing on a 16:10 2560x1600 165hz laptop display,with an i5-12500h and a RTX 3060 Mobile gpu with 6gb VRAM.:fuelcan:

You might see no big difference because your screen resolution is quite high already.
If it is your notebook screen with that resoltuion, your pixel density should also be very high already, resulting in a very sharp image.

If you i.e. play on a 27" monitor or even bigger at full HD (only) or on bigger screens in general, the result from up and downscaling might look very different.

The performance loss is that dramatic because the load on your GPU is much higher when it has to render an image at 400% scaling compared to 100%.
I think that should be obvious. It's like rendering 4 images instead of one.

Rendering at higher resolutions and scale down to screen size is a way to improve image quality, generally speaking.
But the result you see may vary depending on rendering method, scaling method, screen size, pixel density and resolution.

If it's barely visibile in your case. lucky you.
You can run the game at 100% scaling and enjoy it.
For your RTX 3060 mobile at that resolution it's the best you can do.

[Vellari]

TLDR:

Rendering at higher resolution and scaling down to match you actual resolution. is a brute force method of doing "anti-aliasing" type of image enhancement.

If you 'actual resolution' is already high (more than 1080p) you already should have relatively "jaggy free" visuals and don't benefit much from it. Performance loss in not worth it.

[citelis730]

You say that because your pc is low end.

I play at 1440p and i get at 70-100 fps with 300% and around 60-90 with 400% if i have ssao off. This means i can lock to 60fps (works better on this game imo) and have forever a smooth 60fps gameplay. No point to lower the scaling to 100% and just make it look significantly worse.
And i have a RX 7700 XT which is mid-range gpu at best.

[vum]

Thank you all for the responses,my mind is clear now.

[glenhaig]

Originally posted by citelis730:

Not sure what you see on your system but the difference at the image quality between 100% and 400% scaling is huge. Personally i find the game entirely unplayable on anything below 300% on 1440p.

I play on 150% at 1440p and mine doesn't look much different than it did at 400%. My frame rate tanked from 90fps to 25fps after 1.50 so I had to reduce the scaling. Still looks fine IMO.

[J8SUPRME]

Scaling in ETS2 is ONLY used for rendering objects and textures in higher resolution. It has nothing to do with up-scaling and then down-scaling.
When choosing 50% scaling the whole game world is rendered in a very low resolution - no matter what you choose for screen resolution. When using 400% scaling the rendering results in higher resolution of objects and textures.

Scaling in ETS2 is ONLY an expression of how high quality the game engine is rendering the game world. ETS2 makes no use of any up-scaling/down-scaling tech.

The scaling option in ETS2 should really be called something else since it leads to misconceptions of, what the setting really does. Game world resolution would be more accurate.

[maxcry]

Originally posted by J8SUPRME:

Scaling in ETS2 is ONLY used for rendering objects and textures in higher resolution. It has nothing to do with up-scaling and then down-scaling.
When choosing 50% scaling the whole game world is rendered in a very low resolution - no matter what you choose for screen resolution. When using 400% scaling the rendering results in higher resolution of objects and textures.

Scaling in ETS2 is ONLY an expression of how high quality the game engine is rendering the game world. ETS2 makes no use of any up-scaling/down-scaling tech.

The scaling option in ETS2 should really be called something else since it leads to misconceptions of, what the setting really does. Game world resolution would be more accurate.

It's a bit older, but here it is explained:
https://blog.scssoft.com/2016/09/fixing-and-tuning.html

"The term "scaling" sounds innocent, but actually it stands for a super-sampling coefficient. Super-sampling is a brute-force method of anti-aliasing, causing the game to render the whole scene at higher resolution than the target screen resolution, and then downscaling it to actual screen size, making the picture sharper in the process. "

[J8SUPRME]

Originally posted by maxcry:

Originally posted by J8SUPRME:

Scaling in ETS2 is ONLY used for rendering objects and textures in higher resolution. It has nothing to do with up-scaling and then down-scaling.
When choosing 50% scaling the whole game world is rendered in a very low resolution - no matter what you choose for screen resolution. When using 400% scaling the rendering results in higher resolution of objects and textures.

Scaling in ETS2 is ONLY an expression of how high quality the game engine is rendering the game world. ETS2 makes no use of any up-scaling/down-scaling tech.

The scaling option in ETS2 should really be called something else since it leads to misconceptions of, what the setting really does. Game world resolution would be more accurate.

It's a bit older, but here it is explained:
https://blog.scssoft.com/2016/09/fixing-and-tuning.html

"The term "scaling" sounds innocent, but actually it stands for a super-sampling coefficient. Super-sampling is a brute-force method of anti-aliasing, causing the game to render the whole scene at higher resolution than the target screen resolution, and then downscaling it to actual screen size, making the picture sharper in the process. "

Well - guess I am wrong then about how scaling in the game works. But it still doesn't make much sense. If I choose 100% scaling everything should look fine - but it doesn't. It looks like it's made of LEGO's and graphics are smudgy. It's really bad. In other games - choosing 100% scaling looks just fine.
SCS's definition of scaling most then be that 50% is the outmost crap - 400% as other games look - more or less. :-)

[maxcry]

It totally makes sense.
Read what's written above and what others wrote about their expierence with the scaling.
Not the first response, that's not correct.

The result you see may vary. In your case (huge screen) the difference is just more obvious.

The "Lego" thing you see is exactly what that kind of brute force Antialiasing will remove.

There are of course other methods of Antialiasing, depending on the game engine and your GPU.
So other game might look great without any kind of "scaling" like it's used in ATS/ETS2.

[J8SUPRME]

I just tried 200% scaling and 200% for mirror. TAA+SMAA on and Luma Sharpen at 1,5. I'm very surprised to see that my previous settings (400,200,TAA+SMAA on, luma 1,0) does not provide any significant increase in quality over the ones I just tried.