MajorMagee
SOH-CM-2022
There has been a recent flurry of activity from AMD and Nvidia related to letting people with high resolution monitors run their games at lower resolution to gain FPS performance without giving up image quality. The biggest breakthrough has been the implementation by AMD of a low impact Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique that restores the crispness and detail lost in the downscaling process.
My first attempt at getting into this was triggered when Nvidia added a form of this sharpening to their latest drivers. A few tests revealed two key points about this new technology. In fact, it did significantly increase my FPS in direct proportion to how far I was willing to downscale the resolution of my 3440x1440 monitor. Unfortunately the sharpening method that Nvidia implemented was not very effective leaving me with a blurry, pixel crawling mess.
Meanwhile, in the process of looking for an appropriate downscale I did discover that my native screen resolution needed size calibration, in that the Windows display pixel pitch needed to be compensated for at a rate of 1.15x to have my document rulers and screen fonts be WYSISYG. The inverse of this translates to an equivalent downscale of 2992 x 1250 resolution.
I'd given up on the idea of downscaling entirely when I discovered that someone had ported the AMD CAS technique directly into Reshade. Testing that at my native resolution proved to be a the best form of real time sharpening I've ever seen, with just a 10 FPS penalty on performance (far less than any of the other real time sharpening options available). It turns out to be just as good as my most used post-process image improvement technique in Photoshop of contrast enhancement and local contrast sharpening.
That led me back to downscaling to see if I could recover the FPS lost to the new Reshade sharpening option, and sure enough it did.
The question then becomes, what did I really get out of all this. I can downscale to improve performance, but real time processing to restore the image quality brings the performance back to where it was. I can downscale even more than 2992x1250, but the image starts to suffer. I can stay at my native resolution and have enhanced image quality, but at the cost of reduced FPS.
All in all I understand my system a whole lot better than I did before I started and the new Reshade CAS shader is a miracle of effectiveness and performance, but at the end of the day I'm probably back where I started.
My first attempt at getting into this was triggered when Nvidia added a form of this sharpening to their latest drivers. A few tests revealed two key points about this new technology. In fact, it did significantly increase my FPS in direct proportion to how far I was willing to downscale the resolution of my 3440x1440 monitor. Unfortunately the sharpening method that Nvidia implemented was not very effective leaving me with a blurry, pixel crawling mess.
Meanwhile, in the process of looking for an appropriate downscale I did discover that my native screen resolution needed size calibration, in that the Windows display pixel pitch needed to be compensated for at a rate of 1.15x to have my document rulers and screen fonts be WYSISYG. The inverse of this translates to an equivalent downscale of 2992 x 1250 resolution.
I'd given up on the idea of downscaling entirely when I discovered that someone had ported the AMD CAS technique directly into Reshade. Testing that at my native resolution proved to be a the best form of real time sharpening I've ever seen, with just a 10 FPS penalty on performance (far less than any of the other real time sharpening options available). It turns out to be just as good as my most used post-process image improvement technique in Photoshop of contrast enhancement and local contrast sharpening.
That led me back to downscaling to see if I could recover the FPS lost to the new Reshade sharpening option, and sure enough it did.
The question then becomes, what did I really get out of all this. I can downscale to improve performance, but real time processing to restore the image quality brings the performance back to where it was. I can downscale even more than 2992x1250, but the image starts to suffer. I can stay at my native resolution and have enhanced image quality, but at the cost of reduced FPS.
All in all I understand my system a whole lot better than I did before I started and the new Reshade CAS shader is a miracle of effectiveness and performance, but at the end of the day I'm probably back where I started.
