Scaling Resolutions: The Secrets Of 4K Gaming: Whether we like it or not, the emergence of a new generation of consoles presents both challenges and opportunities for PC gamers. These shiny new consoles are packed with mid-range and enthusiastic hardware that puts higher system requirements on a PC.
You will suddenly find that AAA games no longer run at the ideal 60 FPS on conventional GPUs. So a typical new game might be resource intensive, but that means the title makes better use of the latest PC hardware.
This has been the case for the last several generations. Early generation Xbox 360 games such as F.E.A.R. in 2005. And The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion punished even the best gaming PCs.
Assassin's Creed: Unity, the first "real" next-gen game from Ubisoft in 2014, ran at an alarming 24 frames per second at 1440 pixels on the flagship GeForce GTX 980 graphics card. Unity certainly does not represent an early eighth performance profile. The games that came out after PS4 and Xbox One on PC were much harder to launch than they used to be.
By the end of 2020 (as if the problem wasn't enough already), the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X had raised the bar for hardware again. New games such as Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077 struggle to run at 4K even on high-end systems. Adjusting your settings can help, but there is a limit to how well you can go back this way, especially on older platforms.
Another way to dramatically improve performance is by scaling the resolution.
Adjusting the resolution is a great option if you want to further improve performance by 10-15% after changing the settings. When played back at a higher resolution, such as 4K, and a combination of resolution scaling with image sharpness (for GeForce and Radeon solutions, see here), the results are often very close to the original.
What custom resolution should I use? It depends on your monitor's native resolution. A resolution ratio of 83% is usually a good compromise between image quality and performance. In 4K this means a non-standard resolution of 3200 x 1800. In 1440p it is about 2133 x 1200. At 1080p, the pixel density on most displays is already quite low, so it is best to avoid resizing whenever possible.
If performance is truly insufficient, the 0.83% resolution scaling at 1080p is converted to 1600 x 900. This resolution scaling number is not fixed. It may be higher or lower depending on the expected performance, native resolution, and pixel density of your monitor. To find another custom resolution, simply multiply the native resolution by the scaling factor on both axes.
Many games now offer the option to adjust the resolution in the settings menu, but for full compatibility, you'll need to set a native resolution in Windows. In this post, I'll share 4K benchmarks that show you how to do this and highlight the impact on performance. Our test bench is powered by GeForce RTX 3080 and Ryzen 9 3900X. Even with these powerful specs, some games can be set to limit the GPU to 4K, and the resolution scaling provides significant performance gains.
In short, Nvidia's DLSS is similar to resolution scaling in that it displays the game at a lower intrinsic resolution, and then uses temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) and deep learning to enhance the image. Correct implementation of DLSS 2.0 is better than regular resolution expansion, but it is supported for every game. I also ran some DLSS tests for this feature.
Both Nvidia and AMD offer configurable resolution settings in their respective control panels. However, this article uses the platform-independent Custom Resolution Utility (CRU) instead. Custom CRU resolutions tend to have fewer compatibility issues and look stable across all games, as opposed to the Control Panel custom resolution option. Let's start!
1. Download and run the CRU.
CRU creator ToastyX has posted a post on the monitor testing forum that updates the latest CRU. You can also download it from TechSpot. No need to install CRU, just unzip the files in a folder.
2. Run CRU as an administrator
It will take you to a new window with detailed permissions. Here, enter your permissions in the two boxes highlighted below.
Enter the width and height of the resolution. And you don't change other settings need to be changed.
You can also set a custom refresh rate if you want. This is another performance tip that I will discuss later in this article. When done, click OK and exit the app.
3. Restart the graphics driver.
In the CRU folder, there is a file named restart64.exe. Run as administrator. This will restart the graphics driver. You may see screen flickering and some elements (especially hardware accelerated apps, overlays, games, or Steam) for a short time. This is ok and you just need to start it up again.
The new custom resolution is globally visible in Windows settings, as well as in all apps and games where you can change the resolution.
Pro Tip: If you're gaming on a TV or budget monitor, you'll need to enable GPU extensions in the Nvidia / AMD Control Panel. Display scaling is slightly faster (around 1ms), but inexpensive TVs and monitors do terrible scaling, which significantly affects picture quality at non-standard resolutions.
4.Resolution scaling test
Test equipment:
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
- RAM: 2 x 8 GB, 3600 MHz, DDR4
- Motherboard: MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WiFi
- Memory: 2x 480GB NVMe SSD
- Power supply: XPG Core Reactor 850W
What performance improvement can I expect from resolution scaling? At 83 resolution, the frame rate should be about 15% higher, especially when zoomed out at very high resolutions.
Several games have tried to scale the resolution, including Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Borderlands 3. Check out the benchmarks below.
Gearbox's latest shooter is heavily GPU-loaded on the best settings. We started the game at a reduced volume level. However, in native 4K resolution, we only average 66fps, sometimes dropping below 60. I averaged 84fps at 3200 x 1800. That's an astounding 27% more.
Significant performance improvement
As expected, all the games we tested saw significant framerate improvements when played at lower resolutions. A 17% reduction in pixel count improves the average frame rate by up to 27%. At present Modern game engines often tie certain visual effects to frame buffer High resolution. For example, at native 4K, a quarter resolution alpha effect renders at 1920 x 1080, while running at 3200 x 1800 renders at 1600 x 900.
What about DLSS 2.0?
I also tested DLSS 2.0 on Watch Dogs: Legion (no, I didn't make Nvidia do it). Traditional resolution adjustments are not perfect and will affect image quality. Fewer pixels to render. This is especially noticeable in distant high-frequency details. Sharpening can help but it not a magic bullet to improve the renderation.
DLSS 2.0, um... kind of. Wolfenstein: As shown in previous tests with Youngblood and Control. By leveraging RTX tensor cores, the DLSS AI algorithm can effectively reproduce missing pixels starting with low-resolution inputs to the point where high quality is indistinguishable from native rendering. At the bottom, image quality is sacrificed, but as you can see the performance boost is huge.
When I set the quality for DLSS, I got an average of 55 frames per second. This mode actually offers slightly better picture quality than the native resolution of TAA. It also works much better. But we are below 60fps, sometimes below 50fps.
DLSS Balanced provides a very balanced performance profile. An average of 62 FPS, 1% lower in the '50s, isn't ideal but goes well with the adaptive V-Sync game mode.
When DLSS is set to performance mode, you can see a slight decrease in image quality. However, the average frame rate reaches 72 frames per second, and 60 frames per second are less than 1%. Performance mode is for you if you want a smooth 60fps lock. Finally tried the DLSS Ultra Performance mode, but I don't recommend using it.
Nvidia claims that the DLSS Ultra Performance is only for 8K displays, and in this case, it's more than just a marketing tactic. Enabling Ultra Performance mode at 4K resolution will cause the game to upscale at 720p. Still, images look amazingly good, but ghosts and artifacts affect image quality as soon as you rotate the camera.
With great performance, I got an average of 86 FPS at 1% 66 FPS. It's a significant improvement over performance mode, but the image quality degradation isn't worth it.
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