Resolution modifier (must have feature)

[twistking]

38 minutes ago, LucShep said:

[...]

I honestly have no idea if it's checkerboard rendering or tiled rendering but, whatever the case, with Ubisoft and Bioware games it works a treat, with the same superior image quality (if compared to manually change screen resolution). 
 

If images are better to understand, then I got two different screenshots posted right below (nothing special, just to ilustrate my point).
One is 3840x2160 with 80% res.modifier (above), and the other is 3072x1728 with 100% res.modifier (below).

For image full size., right click and "open in new separator" .

 

[...]

 

The question still remains, why it looks that good. I would guess it's checkerboarding combined with very well made temporal anti aliasing. Both of which DCS does not support at the moment.

All i'm saying is that such an implementation is probably way more complicated than building an UI element and telling the renderer to scale differently. There are a bunch of other game engines that tend to look way worse when subsampling within engine (unreal engine for example).

Edited August 2, 2021 by twistking

[LucShep]

21 minutes ago, twistking said:

 

The question still remains, why it looks that good. I would guess it's checkerboarding combined with very well made temporal anti aliasing. Both of which DCS does not support at the moment.

All i'm saying is that such an implementation is probably way more complicated than building an UI element and telling the renderer to scale differently. There are a bunch of other game engines that tend to look way worse when subsampling within engine (unreal engine for example).

 

I see what you mean.
So that means it would require a fundamental revamp or big adjustment inside graphics engine, and not just new code to simply add such function.... oh well, bugger. 

Well, it's on wishlist... maybe fun to revisit sometime later or inspire some dev to get into it.  
 

Edited August 2, 2021 by LucShep

[Tippis]

3 hours ago, twistking said:

i think there is some technical missunderstanding here, which results in you guys talking past each other.

 

the "resolution modifier" is just an UI element. in a way @SharpeXB is right, that changing resolution via such an UI should be the same as manually under- or oversampling by other means. if manual under/oversampling has particular bad results, this would qualify as a bug in my opinion and should be reported as such.

 

HOWEVER i do think that @LucShep means something different. He mentions Ubisofts games and those seem to imploy a technique called checkerboard rendering. it's basically a more clever way of upsampling, not as sophisticated as "intelligent" upsacale-techniques (dlss and such), but still more effective than just extrapolating pixels. also ubi games tend to use very good temporal post process AA.

What SharpeXP is talking about is screen resolution, which is why he offers the funny suggestion of going into your display drivers and setting up a custom resolution (which, just to further highlight how bad a non-solution this is, will cause Windows to warn you that this might damage your display hardware). He's confused about how monitors and graphics cards work, so he also mixes in supersampling, which is a completely different matter that also doesn't work like he assumes.

 

What the OP is talking about is more along the lines of setting an arbitrary canvas size. It can be done independently of the display resolution — hell, it doesn't even have to be the same aspect ratio (although there's every reason in the world to keep it 1:1 with the display) — and then you stretch that to whatever display resolution you want. Internally, this is indeed effectively what you do when you over/under-sample, but the purpose is to easily offer arbitrary levels of granularity to an extent that you don't get using other techniques. It has become a pretty bog-standard thing as VR has become popular, since they let you play with this out of the box. As such, software targeted for those devices will often also expose these scaling options, and make it a per-game thing — that last bit is important because you pretty much never want this to be a universally applied effect.

 

Another benefit, especially if it's done in-game (even in cases where you can set per-game profiles), is that it's also not related to full-screen modes. You decouple rendering resolution from on-screen resolution from display resolution. Render to anamorphic 300x300; scale to 1920x1080; show in a bordered window on your 3440x1440 monitor… for some reason. Maybe slap on some AI temporal upscaling just to de-uglify it…   Silly scenarios aside, the sensible implementation simply lets you select x% fewer or more pixels to be rendered, irrespective of the final amount shown on screen, and rather than having to dive through layers upon layers of apps and drivers and menus, it's just a slider in the game settings that affects nothing else.

[twistking]

1 hour ago, LucShep said:

I see what you mean.
So that means it would require a fundamental revamp or big adjustment inside graphics engine, and not just new code to simply add such function.... oh well, bugger. 

Well, it's on wishlist... maybe fun to revisit sometime later or inspire some dev to get into it.  
 

 

well, it's only an educated guess of course.

the good news however is, that a fundamental engine revamp is in the works. so there is hope!

[twistking]

@Tippis i don't disagree. however i wonder if super sampling wouldn't be technical the same as setting a bigger "canvas" or target size ("target" as in render target). a "SSAA" setting of 2x in dcs would have dcs rendering to a target which is quadruple the size of the specified resolution. wouldn't you agree?

there is obviously no granularity and it only goes for target sizes, that are bigger (x2, x4), but technicall it should still be the same, shouldn't it?

[jib]

On 8/2/2021 at 3:14 AM, LucShep said:

Unfortunately it doesn't solve it.  Mouse still tracks as if always at desktop resolution.
If I change the desktop resolution before running the game (so that both desktop and game have same resolution) then all seems to be fine.

The point here is -and to quote Tippis on a good reply above- having to fiddle with anything like the control panel or desktop resolution settings (before entering the game AND after leaving the game) just to fix a single game's shortcoming, is the ultimate proof that it needs to be fixed, because that level of faff should never, ever be needed.

 

 

I was stuck trying to fix this windowed resolution issue when using a custom resolution for an hour today (wanted to run at 3072 X 1728 on a 4K screen to increase FPS) but 1440P looks crap when you have seen 4K.

Although it is not ideal setting the Desktop resolution to 3072 X 1728 fixed the issue for me.

DCS must have some custom code somewhere that "stretches" more standard sized lower resolutions on a 4K monitor but not custom resolutions.

Anyway my FPS has gone from 35-45 to 55-70.

It should definitely be an option in the base game without changing Windows desktop settings, it would help so many people out with performance issues. 

 

 

 

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, jib said:

1440P looks crap when you have seen 4K.

True, upscaling a lower res does not look good. But a native 1440p signal would look perfectly good on a 1440p display. The moral of the story here is tailor your hardware to the desired screen resolution. If the GPU is not up to handling 4K it would be better to just use a lower resolution display than to try upscaling. 

Edited December 17, 2022 by SharpeXB

[Evoman]

15 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

True, upscaling a lower res does not look good. But a native 1440p signal would look perfectly good on a 1440p display. The moral of the story here is tailor your hardware to the desired screen resolution. If the GPU is not up to handling 4K it would be better to just use a lower resolution display than to try upscaling. 

 

That's correct. Even an old 8-bit Nintendo looks better on an old CRT display than modern fancy displays.