Resolution scale vs actual resolution?

[AmItheFather]

Can someone explain to me the difference between my game's resolution and the "resolution scale?" I'm playing on a mix of high and medium settings at 3440x1440p, but I'm at 90% resolution scale to keep my game above 60fps pretty much the whole time I'm playing.

Is the resolution scale just some type of SSAA? Is it better to have a higher resolution but lower resolution scale? or vice versa?

[wsgroves]

I keep mine at 100 percent but i believe, and do not quote me, that it takes your resolution and multiplys it. If you run at say 1080 and set a scale of 2x it would double that rez and downsample to 1080. I could be totally totally wrong but that is how I thought it worked.\
So if you set it at 90% it will render with 10% less pixels then 3440x1440 I "think".

[Collymilad]

I assume 100% res scale means you're running at the exact res you've chosen in the options...go up or down in % to get the true res you're running in from there - could be wrong but it seems common sense to me.

[AmItheFather]

Interesting. I've found that I can maintain 60fps 99% of the time at 3440x1440 as long as the resolution scale is 80% and volumetric lighting is set to LOW. I don't see much of a difference between 80% and 100% though. I do remember seeing this setting in battlefield 1, but for some reason 42% was the normal resolution scale and any higher would cause "supersampling."

EDIT: Nevermind 100 and 80 is actually a lot different. Looks like 100% is the exact resolution. Gotta keep tweaking.

[Collymilad]

Yeah...although I wouldn't worry too much, even at 80 you'll just get a softer looking image. Depends really on how you want to balance fidelity and graphical effects. Obv 60fps should be the priority though :P

[Limp Squirrel]

it's a very neat option to have to push your hardware if you have it, or reduce it if your system isn't up to par.
But yeah, as people already pointed out, Resolution Scale is a multiplier for the internal resolution, which means it supersamples textures once you exceed 100% (increasing the required system resources the higher you go). On a GTX 1070 I can go up to about 150/160 without experiencing visible performance drops, anything above that will start to show framerates under 60.

For standard quality/performance, set this to 100%, which means it will render the game at the resolution you selected, i.e. 1920*1080 res = 1920*1080 internal resolution.

[JohnTravoltage]

Its exactly what it does in battlefield 1 (they eventually fixed the 42% issue, it was meant to be 100%.

If you have it at 80%, you will be running the game at 80% of your 3440x1440 resolution, and upscaling it to 3440x1440. If you run it higher, than you downsample.

The main reason why this is useful for nvidia users atleast, is for maintaining proper scale for UI/text, as usually this setting only affects 3d rendering. So you can have lower resolutions without ruining the look of the ui, or have higher resolutions without scaling issues.

[AmItheFather]

Originally posted by John Travoltage:

Its exactly what it does in battlefield 1 (they eventually fixed the 42% issue, it was meant to be 100%.

If you have it at 80%, you will be running the game at 80% of your 3440x1440 resolution, and upscaling it to 3440x1440. If you run it higher, than you downsample.

The main reason why this is useful for nvidia users atleast, is for maintaining proper scale for UI/text, as usually this setting only affects 3d rendering. So you can have lower resolutions without ruining the look of the ui, or have higher resolutions without scaling issues.

Yeah I noticed that. Lowering the scale to 50% makes the game look muddy but the menus still look normal. Interesting well I guess I'll be playing the game at 90% of my resolution cause my 1070 can't handle 3440x1440p :(

[Terroriza]

it's the same as just telling your gpu to allow games to run at higher res than your display supports. this is ideal for helping with AA.

[AmItheFather]

While everyone's still here, does volumetric lighting seem to do anything for anyone else? Setting it off seems to look the same as very high, but without hurting my framerate nearly as much.

[JohnTravoltage]

Originally posted by #StopAdvent2017:

While everyone's still here, does volumetric lighting seem to do anything for anyone else? Setting it off seems to look the same as very high, but without hurting my framerate nearly as much.

Yes, it affects exactly what it says it does, if you want to test, find a darkish/smoky area, and equip the spectre weapon (blue glowy weapon). Without volumetric lighting, it just casts a simple light onto surrounding surfaces, with volumetric lighting on it will actually cast that light onto smoke particles, and through the air.

Outside the first ops centre theres a volumetric light coming through a grate in the ceiling for example:


Volumetric light very high

Volumetric light off

Can't be bothered testing it, but the different quality levels probably affect the resolution of the volumetric lights, and maybe disable certain ones, or limit the max number of volumetric sources in a scene at any given time.

[AmItheFather]

Aaah I see cool stuff

[bassmickey]

Is this thread still going?

When you set the resolution multiplier to 100% there's no change at all.

Anything below 100% scales down the internal resolution, then it is upscaled to match the resolution of your display. In your case 3440x1440 at 90% = 3024x1296.

When you go over 100% then it just super samples (SSAA)

I hope that helped.

[Nicholas Steel]

Originally posted by Collymilad:

I assume 100% res scale means you're running at the exact res you've chosen in the options...go up or down in % to get the true res you're running in from there - could be wrong but it seems common sense to me.

That's how it usually works. It affects the rendering resolution, not the display mode being utilized. So you can render a game at a lower resolution while using your displays native resolution to avoid the displays scaler bluring the image.

ie: Computationally renders the scene at a different resolution and up/downscales the results (no need to compute anything about the scene) to your display resolution.

Or have the game render above your display mode resolution (if it supports above 100%) which will effectively be similar to Super Sample AA.

[JohnTravoltage]

Originally posted by bassmickey:

Is this thread still going?

When you set the resolution multiplier to 100% there's no change at all.

Anything below 100% scales down the internal resolution, then it is upscaled to match the resolution of your display. In your case 3440x1440 at 90% = 3024x1296.

When you go over 100% then it just super samples (SSAA)

I hope that helped.

No this thread wasn't still going.... you just necroed almost a year, and people had already come to the same conclusion you stated.

[AmItheFather]

Damn guys long time no see