What is upscale?

[Kagraman™]

What is the "upscale type" setting? What does it mean? What does it do? What is the best option?

[cswiger]

It's a graphics option which trades quality for higher frame rates. You should ignore it unless the game is running too slowly, in which case it might help if you don't mind the tradeoff.

[Psyringe]

Upscaling is a way to get higher framerates at a slight cost of visual fidelity (though some players actually prefer the look of the upscaled image).

Let's say you're playing a game in 4k resolution. That means that your graphics card has to calculate 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400 pixels for each frame. If, however, you play at 1080p resolution, your card only has to calculate 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels - which can be done much faster, obviously.

What "upscaling" does, is that it calculates only a lower-resolution image (for better speed), but then applies scaling techniques that turn it into higher-resolution image. (for better looks). Due to the scaling algorithm used, the output looks better, and more fine-grained, then e.g. putting a 1080p image directly on a 4k monitor.

Upscaling isn't perfect - it can produce artifacts, and sometimes it makes very thin objects vanish (like power lines against the sky). On the plus side, it applies a sharpening filter that many gamers really like. It's definitely worth a shot if you'd like to get some more FPS.

[Kagraman™]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Upscaling is a way to get higher framerates at a slight cost of visual fidelity (though some players actually prefer the look of the upscaled image).

Let's say you're playing a game in 4k resolution. That means that your graphics card has to calculate 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400 pixels for each frame. If, however, you play at 1080p resolution, your card only has to calculate 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels - which can be done much faster, obviously.

What "upscaling" does, is that it calculates only a lower-resolution image (for better speed), but then applies scaling techniques that turn it into higher-resolution image. (for better looks). Due to the scaling algorithm used, the output looks better, and more fine-grained, then e.g. putting a 1080p image directly on a 4k monitor.

Upscaling isn't perfect - it can produce artifacts, and sometimes it makes very thin objects vanish (like power lines against the sky). On the plus side, it applies a sharpening filter that many gamers really like. It's definitely worth a shot if you'd like to get some more FPS.

Thank you for this most insightful explanation. I have tried different upscale type options as well as turning it off completely. Having it off seems to work best for me, although i can barely tell any difference either way to be honest.

[cube]

Different implementations will depend on your graphics card. Intel's XeSS and AMD's FSR are a bit weaker compared to Nvidia's DLSS but that will only work on Nvidia GPUs while the other two work on any GPU. DLSS's quality mode also has the potential to look slightly better than native resolution in certain circumstances but that depends on how it's implemented in each game.
In Hogwarts Legacy it's basically identical so it's essentially free performance gain if you have an Nvidia RTX 20, 30 or 40 series GPU. You do get a tiny bit of ghosting of the player's legs when running if they drift off screen for a moment, but I doubt you'd be able to spot it.