Tech Focus - Dynamic Resolution Scaling: A Great Fit For PC Gaming?

Рет қаралды 118,508

5 жыл бұрын

Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) started out life smoothing performance on console titles by lowering rendering resolution on the fly. But the technique is coming to more and more PC titles too. How does it work, what are the gains and how best to let the user configure it? Alex takes a look.
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Пікірлер: 642

@spork8655 5 жыл бұрын

I don't understand why there are people in the comments who are against having more graphics options in PC games. Seems like a no-brainer to me... Turn it off if you want! Not everybody can afford a high end rig that stomps all over every new game.

@greggreg2458 5 жыл бұрын

More options is always better

@mrorangeDenver 5 жыл бұрын

Isnt that what PC gaming is?

@paul1979uk2000 5 жыл бұрын

More options is always better but I can also understand that for the ones that don't want so many options, there should be a more simply automatic way of trying to get the best out of your hardware, both would be great really as that would suite both novices and experts.

@soraceant 5 жыл бұрын

They just want to whine about consoles.

@lpnp9477 5 жыл бұрын

+Paul Aiello Most games come with auto-detection and presets. If you don't want to dick around in the settings for too long and auto-detection either didn't work or isn't giving you the results you want, go from High to Ultra or Medium to Low or whatever.

@jopparow 5 жыл бұрын

Titanfall 2 is an underappreciated gem.

@SystemBD 5 жыл бұрын

The fact that it's available in Steam is a big factor of that. I want to play it but I, like many other PC users, won't touch Origin with a ten meter pole.

@revildevil2000 5 жыл бұрын

I find that really odd. I've had eons more issues with steam than I ever have had with origin lol If a launcher is preventing you from playing a game, you might want to reevaluate your decisions in life

@revildevil2000 5 жыл бұрын

Also, very true. I wish Titanfall 2 wasn't practically dead

@jopparow 5 жыл бұрын

@@revildevil2000 I would say it's on life support. I have no issues finding games on PC, as long as you're searching for popular game modes.

@Usualcarnage 5 жыл бұрын

One of the best FPS campaigns ever made

@AvatarRishi 5 жыл бұрын

Before I even watch this , I just wanna say I love these Tech Focus videos.

@paul1979uk2000 5 жыл бұрын

For me I don't have any real issue with Origin and Uplay but I find that it really needs to be a must have game for me to buy it on Origin and Uplay whereas on Steam I'm quite happy to buy many filler games and I suspect I would buy more EA filler games if they ware on Steam, as it is, we have too many games and not really enough time to really care so it doesn't matter much.

@Usualcarnage 5 жыл бұрын

always good to have more pc settings, as long as they’re optional

@jubeh 5 жыл бұрын

This. Don't force console handicaps onto our PC's. If your PC won't run a game, give the user the option how to handle this with options like reducing resolution manually or effects or even using dynamic res, but leave that option on the hands of the users, don't force it on them. Personally, if I select 1080p or 1440p I expect the game to stay that way and I'm willing to sacrifice the frame rate (not frame timing) on certain games.

@SirMaxiimus 2 жыл бұрын

*Cough cough* battlefront 2 *cough cough*

@FinallyZoey23 5 жыл бұрын

Dynamic resolution is one of the coolest techs introduced in games. This can really help consoles especially hit that magic 60fps and for me on pc is useful to try and hit the 165fps for my monitor. Love the videos keep up the great work Alex / Digital Foundry

@aj.5841 3 жыл бұрын

Using dynamic resolution enabled on Jedi Fallen Order is an absolute godsend. That's on a 5700 XT and I'm thankful this graohics option exiats for me personally

@TehBurek 5 жыл бұрын

I'd like to offer some more technical background if anyone's interested. The reason why we don't just have dynamic resolution in every game or why you can't just force it on everywhere via driver panel or something is that it requires that the game's renderer is designed from the ground up to support it. It's not as easy as flicking a switch. To try my hand at analogies again - it would be like dynamically scaling the size of your apartment by moving the walls around. You'd have a lot of furniture to move and things to readjust every time it happens (as many games can take a couple of seconds or even require a restart when you manually change the resolution), and it would be a lot of work for it to happen even once, let alone have it happening constantly. To be able to sustain that, you'd need to think of a layout where nothing would get in the way, have furniture purpose-built for that, on wheels, rails or something, etc. To get a bit more technical, mostly it gets down to memory allocations (different sizes of frame buffers require different amounts of memory) and making sure that everything screen-spaced (or referencing pixels and pixels sizes or resolution or 2D positions directly) is made with dynamic scaling in mind. Maybe the biggest enemy here is just the assumption that frame buffer is the same thing as the screen and that then you're gonna use all of it. In order to avoid reallocating the frame buffer, you can reserve space for the largest resolution you'll use, and then with scaling factor in mind maybe use a smaller part of it, which will then be upscaled to cover the screen. That's where you need to make sure everything that's being drawn will respect that smaller drawing window and not hog up the entire framebuffer, which is not the way things have been traditionally done. And that's why it's unfeasible to force games to use this, which were not built for it - you can't really force the game to really change the resolution 60 times or more per second, nor can you force it to use just a part of the screen when it thinks it's running fullscreen, it just wasn't built to understand that. With all that said, probably the majority of popular games are using popular established engines, and when they implement the support, it will be ready out-of-the-box for future games, which is cool, as this whole dynamic resolution thing is quite useful.

@gstylez0107 5 жыл бұрын

I didn't read the comment, but I liked it only because of the amount of effort the op clearly put into writing it... That kind of effort deserves recognition dammit!

@Getfuqqedfedboy 5 жыл бұрын

I couldn’t read all of it, but you are correct about it being more about the game engine.. the drivers and scalers in modern graphics cards (within the last 5 years) all can support dynamic resolutions scaling in real time, it’s down to the game devs as they he engine they used or rendering methodology. Technically speaking a toggle could be implemented into drivers to on the fly adjust resolution depending on load or target FPS, but it could result in visual glitches (like poor LOD scaling) or really rough images with a lot of jaggies and bluriness

@TehBurek 5 жыл бұрын

But you can't implement that in the driver, for a variety of reasons. Most come down to simple logic - if an application is made under the assumption that the resolution is a constant, which was a very sane and reasonable thing to assume up until very recently, it will make further assumptions based on that. I'll try to give a very simplified example: Say a game wants to draw a 2D health indicator in the corner of the screen, and it was made with the conventional wisdom that the resolution is constant. That indicator should be a 100 pixels away from the edge of the screen. So, such a game might, during initialization / loading, pre-calculate the position as 1920 - 100 = 1820 and 1080 - 100 = 980 and just remember (1820, 980) as the position that HUD element should be drawn to, to avoid recalculating it over and over again. And here lies the problem, if the game was made under the assumption that the resolution is constant, it will probably do a bunch of other things in similar vein. So even if you somehow force the resolution change, things will look messed up and misaligned and slide around the screen because the game will be drawing the thing at (1820, 980) all the time, assuming that's the right spot. But if the resolution increased, it will drift towards the middle of the screen and get smaller, if it decreased, it would grow larger and drift outside the screen. And that's a dead end, to change this, you'd need to understand the intentions of the code and somehow reinterpret them to suit your new goals, which is something even highly skilled humans can barely do, even with access to source code and full documentation. You're essentially in the same ballpark as wanting a driver to force gameplay changes - in *any* game, no matter what.

@wholebrain8457 5 жыл бұрын

@@TehBurek Thanks for the effort and the analogy. I think that Dynamic Resolution is really not a difficult feature to implement if designed from the ground up, as you say. I really appreciate it when I have the choice to prioritize frame rate over resolution, especially when some few scenes and effects are a lot more gpu intensive than the rest of them. Is there any reason why developers would purposely avoid giving their engine this capability ?

@TehBurek 5 жыл бұрын

Oh, you're welcome. And to answer your question, I don't think there's a reason to purposely avoid it. It probably mostly just comes down to legacy and older codebases which would need some possibly painful retooling to support the feature, and they just decide it isn't worth it. But even for new projects made from the ground up, it might work well enough without it, so it wouldn't be justified to spend time and resources implementing it. It's one of those things that seems very simple on the surface, but the devil is in the details. And modern games have a looot of details (technical and otherwise). With all the screen-space stuff going around these days, like screen-space reflections, temporal antialiasing, upscaling/reconstruction/checkerboarding and such, it becomes more difficult to make sure everything will work fine and won't act up if the resolution is going up and down between each frame. So yeah, pretty much like an other feature that requires deep integration, legacy codebases probably give most friction, but also, not every project really needs every tech feature.

@TheMostWanted92 5 жыл бұрын

I think PC gamers could also benefit from checkerboard rendering. If consoles with older hardware can use it to reach 1080p+ resolutions with it, then it could help users with lower end PCs to also reach those higher resolutions. Thus you get improved visual quality without much of a performance hit.

@imo098765 5 жыл бұрын

Its might not be as good as the real thing, getting that 60fps lock running close to 4K on a single gpu with the best compromise of settings would be great regardless of how good we think native 4K is

@frosty6845 5 жыл бұрын

@UHD Gaming PC good for you but not everyone can afford a 1080ti and an i7

@ablone 5 жыл бұрын

@UHD Gaming PC right, so you stick to the fat 4k with 30fps while others who don't spend 1k+ on PC's can benefit from checkerboarding

@paul1979uk2000 5 жыл бұрын

If you can get games to run better on weaker hardware then it will likely mean more sales for the developers, more options is always better then less but it needs to be done in a easy to understand way and ideally, automated.

@ablone 5 жыл бұрын

@UHD Gaming PC Eh, I don't see the difference between 1440p and 4k unless you are 2cm near your screen. I mean sure if you think it makes you superior that you like 4k then sure go ahead. Also if devs can add checkerboarding and get more people to play their game then they will obviously do it but it's also time consuming. But yeah they should add checkerboarding, if you don't like it then turn it off lmao, get off your high horse.

@TheAlison1456 5 жыл бұрын

God, TItanfall 2 is such a good game.

@gstylez0107 5 жыл бұрын

Hell yeah it is

@MegamanEXEv2 5 жыл бұрын

Some of these snobs in the comments...you realize most of us DONT have $3000 rigs right? I can’t wait until DRS is more common! I have a 970 in my main PC and a 950 in my second, and I game on both. DRS would let the hardware last a bit longer and still get to enjoy some nice bells and whistles. I don’t care if the screen goes blurry for 2 seconds when there’s a bunch of alpha on the screen, at least the FPS will stay at 60.

@SianaGearz 5 жыл бұрын

I play Warframe occasionally on GT645M when i'm away from PC, thanks to dynamic resolution. That way i can have half-way passable imagery and i don't suffer single-digit framerates when i suddenly need to escape from the middle of an explosion.

@imo098765 5 жыл бұрын

UHD gaming, its already $800 for the card then you still need a 4K monitor and then if you really want to advantage you need a g-sync one too, so thats what $600 on the low end. Just the graphics card and monitor to make the most use of that graphics card would be $1400. So you would end up spending more than $2000 on the entire PC. And if you want to use HDR from the 2080 at 4K thats another kidney

@TexelGuy 5 жыл бұрын

Yeah it's actually great tech when implemented properly. The only platform I played on with dynamic res is my switch, and so far it's worked well enough for me to think "Yeah, I'd rather have the stable 30 or 60 fps than having a slightly sharper image". On PC I didn't actually feel like I needed it, but as games become more demanding, I'm gonna bet my 1070 will need dynamic resolution tech to keep a stable 60 fps, if more games start implementing this technology on PC versions too that is.

@imo098765 5 жыл бұрын

After experiencing a g-sync monitor its really hard not to want one but living in a country where my $2200 PC alone is worth about $800 new in the US when I bought it, that monitor is a bit far away until I get a job

@paul1979uk2000 5 жыл бұрын

My two brothers used to be snobs but they saw the light after seeing the Nvidia presentations the other day of thoes new cards and it's put them right off the high end market, now they are sticking to the mid range market which is around the 580 and 1060, clearly people do have a braking point when greed sets in like Nvidia have been doing lately.

@Silikone 5 жыл бұрын

We need a tech focus on the often very misunderstood bloom.

@AlejandroLZuvic 5 жыл бұрын

Yesssss! Please Alex!

@SvDKILLSWITCH 5 жыл бұрын

Dynamic resolution scaling options and temporal reconstruction options (such as checkerboarding) should be something that all good PC games offer.

@Arbiter099 5 жыл бұрын

Rainbow six siege used to offer the console AA option where only half the scene is rendered and the other reconstructed but removed it sometime last year. A shame as it was incredible for performance

@Xilefian 5 жыл бұрын

It's kind of a shame that most games these days use deferred rendering and thus cannot afford the memory needed for multi-sampling: MSAA combined with resolution scaling can produce some fantastic results, I use it a lot in my mobile graphics technology to maintain 30FPS rendering. Modern graphics is certainly pixel-shading bottle-necked, which is why resolution changing is so effective these days compared to older games.

@BenchARTVideos 5 жыл бұрын

You know you are a PC Gamer Benchmarker when you immediately recognize the background music from Uniengine: Heaven Benchmark Tool :P EDIT: And then later the Uniengine Valley after the 04:30 OST :)

@KenpoJuJitsu3 5 жыл бұрын

I know right?

@teero121 5 жыл бұрын

bruuh thank you so much. I knew that song sounded familiar

@TexelGuy 5 жыл бұрын

Yeah, it's a pretty chill soundtrack.

@soraceant 5 жыл бұрын

I guess I'm not then

@aharmlesspie 5 жыл бұрын

First things I run on every new PC build, even though they're old, they're still so pretty!

@LarsBars17 5 жыл бұрын

Excellent content, Alex your delivery and speech has improved a lot! Great job.

@VladislavKravtsov 5 жыл бұрын

Great video Alex, please more tech videos like this!

@bonfingertip 5 жыл бұрын

Great info Alex, looking forward to your next overview/indepth vids.

@TheCanadian0495 5 жыл бұрын

Love these tech focus videos. Great explanations and good examples. Keep it up!

@bradleythatcher2869 5 жыл бұрын

Awesome video. I do think that this is a great feature that will be standard moving forward. It will continue to evolve. I love how you pointed out the issues that still exists with it.

@foxpants 5 жыл бұрын

I think I love tweaking as much as you do, I'm borderline getting more enjoyment from games by tweaking and exploring all of the settings and performance they have to offer, and doing my own little internal analysis. Digital Foundry you guys rock!

@tyunboy 5 жыл бұрын

Awesome video Alex, thank you for all the cool insights

@ZinhoMegaman 5 жыл бұрын

Great video Alex, keep up the good work!

@VaJohn 5 жыл бұрын

Loving the PC focused content, keep it up Alex!

@slatanek 5 жыл бұрын

Great job Alex! I wouldn't expect anything else though judging from your previous videos. In general Digital Foundry is a Godsend for any technically inclined folks. Keep it up guys!

@Ryusennin 5 жыл бұрын

Ironically, in Warframe the dynamic resolution works nice on PC but not at all on PS4.

@WickedRibbon 5 жыл бұрын

Great video. Really like this series.

@synthsx 5 жыл бұрын

Awesome content. Thanks for doing this, DF.

@mickles1975 5 жыл бұрын

"A stuttering 58fps" Holy shit. I've played games at 15fps. 58 would have been godly smoothness.

@blackmanx5845 5 жыл бұрын

Some great information presented in this video. Thanks!

@xplayndo5890 5 жыл бұрын

I just finished TITANFALL2 on the PS4 and i had a blast playing it ... it plays so great and smooth on a console ! ... Thanks to DRS ! great video as always alex ! Thanks a bunch \m/

@ArkaynAdrian 5 жыл бұрын

+DigitalFoundry , Loving Alex's tech vids. Keep 'em coming!

@Owen-uk3sj 5 жыл бұрын

A great fit for PC gaming would be Checkerboard rendering.

@PookaBot 5 жыл бұрын

Nvidia's new cards can use AI cores to do something similar. But yeah 8t should be integrated at this point.

@SianaGearz 5 жыл бұрын

Checkerboard rendering is a good anti-aliasing technique regardless of artefacts, which make it fairly obvious for lower native resolutions otherwise. Assuming you're targeting 1080p and you have just about enough performance to make it with FXAA and little left over - instead you can render 1440p - double the pixels with half the pixels masked out in a checkerboard pattern (technically you set up a 720p framebuffer with a 2x supersampling and custom subsample positions according to 2 of the 4 quadrants, interpolate that to 1440p using direct subsample reads, with something like Median fill) and shrink that down to 1080p, some post-sharpening, and you can have a very attractive image that doesn't have FXAA tells on it like sparkly trees and way too jumpy near-vertical lines. You can even use temporal antialiasing and sacrifice a good bit of quality for performance in the implementation - no big deal, it's getting scaled down anyway. I also think just like anti-aliasing methods that are all optional and you get to choose which bothers you the least in most PC releases, Checkerboard rendering would make for a good option, not necessarily a default or only image enhancement method, especially for users that aren't going to reach 4k even checkerboarded.

@SianaGearz 5 жыл бұрын

Checkerboard rendering can be a foundaton for supersampling antialiasing when there's not enough performance headroom for naive supersampling. Details above.

@Xilefian 5 жыл бұрын

Yeah I've seen an Intel white paper describing using something akin to checker-board rendering as a form of super-sampling along with temporal reconstruction to fill the gaps on each frame. All these techniques just makes me wish deferred renderers could handle the memory for MSAA. What I'd like to see is development on NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples where we can dedicate more sample buffers to specific deferred GBuffers and allow (shitty) interpolation for buffers we care less about (velocity buffer, for one), bring back MSAA for the buffers that contribute the most important geometry information to the final scene.

@bitscorpion4687 5 жыл бұрын

Nvidia is bringing DLSS (using A.I to upscale) only drawback is that it need a super computer to train the AI so the games that use it would be limited (when it is used we are looking at 50% better performance)

@iamcll 5 жыл бұрын

man that assassin's creed part was stuttery af.

@igorthelight 5 жыл бұрын

Yep!

@JustOneGuy 5 жыл бұрын

Heaven benchmark music in the background. Nice touch.

@OxRashedxO 5 жыл бұрын

Amazing educational video. Thanks Alex!

@Sackboy612 5 жыл бұрын

It really sounds like you love producing these videos Alex, just thought i'd mention that :)

@dutchdykefinger 5 жыл бұрын

awesome technical content lately guys!

@rise4097 5 жыл бұрын

I did enjoy and appreciate this video! Thanks guys!

@samdiego1989 5 жыл бұрын

Man, I wish I knew half of the info these guys know here at Digital Foundry. I've only recently started learning more about this stuff in depth, having built a great pc for gaming. Love watching these videos. Really helps me understand more. Maybe I should take a few classes as well. Not even sure where to begin with that though.

@LexlCZl 5 жыл бұрын

very good Job Alex! :) Keep it UP! (i come from PC and im basicly like you, love tinkering / options)

@joemuis23 5 жыл бұрын

I rarely play videogames but I find the tech behind them very fascinating. Also love the aestetic of em

@robertsnyder4963 5 жыл бұрын

I feel like DRS should be a default setting in console games, to help get a more stable/higher fps (until variable refresh rate on TVs become more commonplace). I really feel like smoother gameplay should be a higher focus on consoles vs pushing for higher resolutions. On PC ports, I find it a nice option, especially in shooters!

@SoundSelector 3 жыл бұрын

Now that AMD offers dynamic resolution scaling in DRIVER level this video NEEDS a fresh version !

@Indigo000 5 жыл бұрын

Your videos are amazing! Thank you!

@wamba2097 5 жыл бұрын

Everyone benefits from having the option to enable DRS.

@saadahmad1606 5 жыл бұрын

I have a GTX1080 and a 4K monitor and I would love to run every game in 4K 60 fps but its just not possible sometimes so dynamic resolution is a godsend. Yes I could just lower the resolution in game but, 1) Everything looks better on a monitor's native resolution. 2) Most games do not scale down the UI elements with dynamic resolution which means the UI always looks nice and sharp.

@essencialreal 5 жыл бұрын

In my case, I play in a OLED TV. It's perfect in 1080p and 4K. But it's shity in any resolution between both. DSR is a perfect solution for me.

@saadahmad1606 5 жыл бұрын

Rodolfo Valiati yeah that's the same for me, except its only 4K. Any other resolution just looks badly scaled.

@essencialreal 5 жыл бұрын

@@saadahmad1606 I have a 4790k with 1080TI. 99% playing in 4K. Monster GPU.

@Mlordy 5 жыл бұрын

1440p Ultra will look stunning on a 4K Monitor.

@MarioManTV 5 жыл бұрын

Saad Ahmad to me, that's just a bandaid solution to poor display scaling. I've been a longtime proponent of proper nearest-neighbor scaling on NVIDIA cards, which would make 1080p look essentially native on a 4K monitor. Instead, it's a blurry mess unless the monitor itself has a half decent scaler.

@DGP406 5 жыл бұрын

these videos are so good to watch

@solidtone5784 5 жыл бұрын

Fun fact: Titanfall 2 has no dlc or loot boxes RNG system unlike Call Of Duty, so please buy Titanfall 2.

@toddsmith8082 5 жыл бұрын

Dylan Nguyen I got Titanfall 2 a couple days ago 🤔

@jordanallen6329 5 жыл бұрын

fun fact: Titanfall 2 is made by EA so its bad

@fufu1405 5 жыл бұрын

Seeing how Titanfall 2 didn‘t get the success it deserved, made me lose so much hope in the whole gaming community.

@fufu1405 5 жыл бұрын

Jordan Allen Are you serious?

@MarioManTV 5 жыл бұрын

Jordan Allen fun fact: Titanfall was developed by Respawn and published under EA. There's a big difference.

@harkkyn 5 жыл бұрын

Nice choice using the track from Valley :)

@07mkis 5 жыл бұрын

wonderful work

@sumitupadhayay2270 5 жыл бұрын

4:40 love that heaven benchmark sound

@ctsixthsense3828 5 жыл бұрын

great article as always!

@peteh460 5 жыл бұрын

Not gonna lie dynamic rez is the only thing that makes Monster Hunter playable.

@Sir-Prizse 5 жыл бұрын

Great video, thanks!

@straightupgamer354 5 жыл бұрын

Eagerly awaiting Richard's and the crews analysis on Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay.

@KenpoJuJitsu3 5 жыл бұрын

Is that the Unigine Heaven Benchmark I hear in the background? ...and Valley now that I'm further through the video.

@user-zd2kl9yg4v 5 жыл бұрын

Thank you, you saved me a few hours.

@Logan589XP 5 жыл бұрын

KenpoJuJitsu3 also Unigine Tropics!

@mbe102 5 жыл бұрын

Haha, that Unigine Heaven music is so good for ambience.

@mbe102 5 жыл бұрын

Also, I'll never get tired of your English warping into hyperspace to over enunciate german words. Vulvfenshtine. Classic. Reminds me of people who speak pure Mandarin, and then with an almost perfect North America Accent say a random English word in the middle of it. Its an interesting quirk of foreign language use. For example: 我真的很想去市中心买一些KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN

@adamsmith8695 5 жыл бұрын

great vid, please do a tech focus on deep learning super sampling next

@Gehab 5 жыл бұрын

3:23 never head anyone pronounce the game like that before lmao. Excellent video though! Would love more focused tech videos like this!

@postscriptum8142 5 жыл бұрын

You never heard a German word being pronounced correctly before?

@Gogo32monkey 5 жыл бұрын

Actually is the correct way to pronounce it. It's just everyone else is too lazy to say it right.

@iTouchin 5 жыл бұрын

We've found the Nazi...

@raymondkelly8451 3 жыл бұрын

There is no w pronunciation in the german language

@daweitao2668 5 жыл бұрын

Great video, cheers

@Andarus 5 жыл бұрын

I love these PC-specific Videos.

@GameMasterpg 5 жыл бұрын

Love the 4K video. And when We Happy Few Coming

@toastymuffin4153 5 жыл бұрын

That Unigine benchmark music in the background though......

@IIIrdOff 5 жыл бұрын

I really like that Tittanfall 2 has option for dynamic resolution only on edges of screen, but fixed at center, where it's more important

@dthomasfromnc 5 жыл бұрын

Saw a Pilot from Titanfall in the thumbnail. Never clicked so fast. 😂😂😂😂

@chloemcholoe3280 5 жыл бұрын

amazing video!

@Abrahambinzz 5 жыл бұрын

simply the best tech and gaming youtube chanel ever

@mrchiledonut 5 жыл бұрын

Please take a look at the new Cyberpunk footage!

@PookaBot 5 жыл бұрын

Would be nice if Nvidia and AMD could integrate this on the driver level so we could use it in any game. Seems like Nvidia could at least give us multi-res shading. (not to mention checkerboarding etc)

@paul1979uk2000 5 жыл бұрын

Would be intresting if they could do that at a driver level as that could work with any game and give gamers more options in how they play them.

@essencialreal 5 жыл бұрын

There is only to supersampling. Need it to downsampling.

@AlejandroLZuvic 5 жыл бұрын

+Jinx You could supersample a low resolution image (TSAA or something similar) but you can't downsample a high res image expecting better performance. In other words, if a game engine is rendering the image at X resolution it's impossible to tell it to render the image at 0.5X, and if you try to sample the image at 0.5X AFTER the engine spits up the buffered image the performance gain is literally non-existent.

@TehBurek 5 жыл бұрын

I actually wrote a lengthy comment about this here before seeing this one :) TL;DR: It can't really be done that way, the game engine has to have internal support for such a disruptive feature. In the olden fixed function days, maybe. But nowadays it can't be done without the application itself being a knowing and willing participant.

@PookaBot 5 жыл бұрын

Ah too bad :(

@RitaMaSTeR 5 жыл бұрын

I really like your content!

@Nasgul360 4 жыл бұрын

Do you know if there is a possibilty to know the actual resolution and it's modification in real-time ? I use RivaTuner for monitoring my PC but I don't think there is an option to display the actual resolution. Do you know some software able to do that ? Thx :)

@pipyakas 5 жыл бұрын

It's a great feature to target stable performance while maximizing the availabe gpu resources, Im wondering why it took so long to be implemented on pc although the feature has long been used on consoles

@pipyakas 5 жыл бұрын

A framerate target, and a system to adjust resolution base on how much you can maintain the target, doesn't seem to have anything PC-specific that's preventing its implementation to me

@Jonen560ti 5 жыл бұрын

I suspect the main reason is low demand, PC gamers can change resolution on demand so it might be considered a low priority option. I develop with UE4 and it currently only supports dynres for PS4, XO, Switch and Oculus Rift. You can hack it for pc, but Epic warns that it could be highly unstable for now so i guess dogen may have a point and the multitude of PC hardware makes it easy to botch the implementation. Epic is also only going to support it on DX12 and Vulkan on PC, but i don't know if that's just a design choice, or if the new api's are needed to make it work. Some graphics features also play badly with dynres like certain types of depth of field and ambient occlusion which can simply be omitted on console, but PC players may prefer to have these features over dynres which may also be a factor.

@MarioManTV 5 жыл бұрын

Quy Nguyen from what I can tell, dynamic resolution was part of the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro devkits, so they were essentially free for developers to add. There isn't a standard way to do this on PC, so development teams have had to build it themselves. Usually, it's not worth the time and effort. For the sake of developer accessibility, I look forward to a time when common engines like Unreal and Unity have these features built-in.

@TurokRevolution 5 жыл бұрын

I always love the videos made by Alex, he's German too and plays the same games I do. Sadly they don't teach me anything new but recapping everything is good enough.

@dk1480 5 жыл бұрын

Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider both have dynamic resolution with 2 options: target fps that can target 30 to 120 fps with free choice (also there is a vertical sync target option); and the minimum resolution scale (quality 85%, balance 75% and perfomance that can drop down to 50%). There is also a fps cap option you can use 30 45 60 75 90 105 and 120 fps cap

@lyconxero457 5 жыл бұрын

Very interesting. I've actually been very impressed with Dynamic Resolution this generation and how it's allowed games to get closer to their target frame-rates.

@leonthesleepy 5 жыл бұрын

I love Dynamic Resolutions, wish more games had it as an option.

@RazorEdgeBullie 5 жыл бұрын

Love the heaven benchmark song in the background.

@SianaGearz 5 жыл бұрын

I now have an urge to implement dynamic resolution or dynamically switched SSAA on Dreamcast. Switchable SSAA 2x acts in horizontal, while in vertical, you have a flexible scaler. Best thing is you don't need to scale the framebuffer, it's always output size, the number of TA tiles changes, but the scaling occurs the moment the tile is copied into the framebuffer.

@EVPointMaster 5 жыл бұрын

I also hope that if we get dynamic res options in games, we can set a range of target framerates for use with variable refreshrate displays.

@conyo985 5 жыл бұрын

Very informative video as always Alex. I really welcome dynamic resolution in PC since not all PC gamers have high end hardware and high framerates is a must for every PC gamer. I've got to say Assassin's Creed Origins implementation of dynamic resolution is really bad. I just use my own custom detail and resolution settings in Origins and I have stable framerates than the dynamic resolution which is very stuttery.

@loganwolv3393 5 жыл бұрын

Great tech.I hope it gets implemented in more PC games in the future.

@Clairvoyant81 5 жыл бұрын

Honestly... give me every optimization that works well enough on consoles. I want good checkerboarding, I want dynamic resolution, I want good LOD blending etc. etc. There's no reason to offer these things to PC gamers. People who don't like it can enjoy their native 4K. I'd rather have native 4K when it's possible with a good frame rate and a lower resolution when there are issues. I'd also prefer a good checkerboarding solution to a native 1440p image... and I'm tired of seeing LOD popin.

@EposVox 5 жыл бұрын

Very interesting. nice!

@smashandburnyt6938 3 жыл бұрын

Lol underrated comment. Here’s a like for you

@abramjessiah 4 жыл бұрын

Is there a way to make the edges of the screen a lower resolution while keeping the areas in the center of the screen at a higher resolution? Almost like a vignette area of lower resolution?

@timothyamanda4960 2 жыл бұрын

yes. Its called foveated rendering. It is used in VR most often, allowing more pixels to be rendered where your eye is actually focused.

@mrcraggle 5 жыл бұрын

The options menu (and benchmark tool) in Gears 4 on PC is one of the best out there. It tells you what each option does with clear language and how much performance is impacted. It's a shame that every other MS studio doesn't follow suit.

@HasanAslan 5 жыл бұрын

Digital Foundry is the only channel I have notifications on.

@justadrummervienna 4 жыл бұрын

that music is from the matrox rendering demo... that one with the fairy. and at the end a killer instinct remix was used. did i won any price?

@Belfoxy 5 жыл бұрын

Is driver level dynamic resolution scaling a feasible option? Performance overlays can keep track of GPu usage, so maybe resolution could always be scaled (via supersampling) to keep GPu load at ~99-100%?

@mbed0123 5 жыл бұрын

DSR helps my computer actually hit full performance/load on my 1080p 120hz monitor. Selecting 4k puts enough (obviously) of a load on my GPU's to push them to their overclocked profile. As opposed to just sitting idle on their base clocks and stuttering back and forth upon random loads in game. And playing with the settings as such on a 120hz monitor is a dream come true!!

@mrchiledonut 5 жыл бұрын

You guys should do a video on animations/physics.

@veggav 5 жыл бұрын

I have a question. Isn't it possible for dynamic resolution to be implemented per driver? You can change sampling options in the gpu control panel. Why not some universal settings for dynamic resolution for games that do not support it?

@fuckoffannoyingutube 5 жыл бұрын

I'm not to happy if dynamic resolution is just slapped onto a console port without an option to turn it off. in itself though I appreciate it. I didn't always have a good rig and DRS is definitely going to help lower end PC gamers as well as aging console generations. another great insight, Alex. you already changed my mind on motion blur :P

@IscapePVPOwning 5 жыл бұрын

i think best outcome is a combination of Dynamic resolution/checker board rendering, and ability have dynamic graphical settings, such as shadows and global illumination or even anti aliasing going from x2 to x8, any heavy GPU effects, not so much textures or anisotropic filtering any low performance hitting graphical effects ect. having ability to have all forms of dynamic scale from resolution to graphical settings would in my mind be most optimal path, and heavy reliance on AI on GPU, to be able determined what would be less jarring from a visual stand point. this could mean base on whats being displayed on screen, and target FPS, as well as resolution can all be in sync with the AI chip to be able to achieve the target frame, example if you are getting 58fps at 4k and/or AI predicts that next frame will most likely drop, it changes the shadow and global illumination ect , from very high to other high or medium, if that is hypothetically doesn't reach the target frame rate, dynamic resolution can then drop from 4k to 3200x1800 / 2560x1440, preferably 3200x1800, this combination will be less jarring in my opinion this would be base on any target fps and current resolution that game is playing/running and graphical settings.

@thedugal1373 5 жыл бұрын

I really like this technology. Using dynamic resolution, I've been able to play Prey at a constant 60 FPS on modest hardware with every thing cranked up at high.

@docwhogr 5 жыл бұрын

Can your answer me please if is possible to do a progressive frame rendering; 1st a even lines pass and if is enough time a odd lines pass? ergo real time dynamic resolution.. can you ask a developer if the drivers allow for that?

@justadrummervienna 4 жыл бұрын

that music is from the matrox rendering demo... that one with the fairy

@ViperStudiosAndy 5 жыл бұрын

I love how you say Wolfenstein New Colossus at 3:23

@Xyno76 5 жыл бұрын

Love the Unigine BG music in this video :D

@smoogles 5 жыл бұрын

There's a mod/dll for Skyrim that reduced resolution based on how fast the camera was moving, it was more basic but seemed to do it's job wonderfully almost acting like a motion blur.