How to run higher than the maximum resolutions on your display

[TOMPPIX]

[spoiler=Introducing GeDoSaTo]

http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/

 

In 2013, after working on DPfix, I had a vision.

I saw a world in which everyone was free to downsample any game, unbound by the restrictions of their monitor or display driver. One where people could downsample at high refresh rates, and where the quality of the scaling in real-time was finally equal to that achieved in image manipulation programs.

But I dared dream further than that. What about providing a set of tools, which would allow anyone, without low-level knowledge of Windows programming or even access to a compiler, to perform game-specific modifications and improvements such as DSfix, AGmod or DPfix? Why not also enable talented artists to use their craft on any game, not just ones designed to be modifiable by their creators?

Around Christmas, I started work on GeDoSaTo, the Generic DownSampling Tool. It is a testament to both that dream, and to my complete inability to come up with good names. Development proceeded at a furious pace throughout January, using the very latest in development tools

At this point, I’d like to thank the beta testers who supported GeDoSaTo development during that time, and also Sara (of Ys PC fame among other things) who provided invaluable help regarding mouse position mapping when downsampling.

The Slowdown

In short, GeDoSaTo worked, but never sufficiently well for me to be happy releasing it to a broader public. It still only supports DirectX 9 and 9ex, and many games have issues even with those. Not all the features I originally envisioned are integrated yet. Moreover, in the second half of February and all of March I was swamped with “real work”, and so the project mostly rested.

However, with the release of Dark Souls 2 coming up, I’ve realized that if I wait until I am fully happy with it I might never release GeDoSaTo. Thus, this post.

Current State

 

Neat, huh?

As you can see above, GeDoSaTo works. It currently sports the following features:

Downsampling, better than any other solution:
Essentially no resolution limits (beyond those of the GPU)
Downsampling from more than 4x the resolution is useful (multi-stage downsampling)
Selection of downsampling methods (not just bilinear sampling)
Downsampling in linear color space
Support downsampling to high-frequency (e.g. 120 Hz or 144 Hz) target modes
Not limited by display hardware
Take screenshots of either the pre-downsampled full buffer or the actual image displayed on screen (automatically sorted in per-game folders!)
Generic texture overriding for all textures loaded using D3DX
It uses a far more solid injection and interception method than my earlier efforts
However, there are plenty of bugs, limitations, and many things I would like in order to call it “complete” are still missing:

Only DX9 and 9ex supported, and only in 32 bit. No DX10, 11 or OpenGL, and no 64 bit games
No per-game configuration yet
No plugin or scripting system yet, to allow everyone to implement game-specific graphical features
How? & the Problems

GeDoSaTo works by telling everyone who asks (generally, games and their configuration programs) that a given, configurable, arbitrary resolution is supported, and once that resolution is selected, it will actually use a different resolution in hardware, while pretending to use the other resolution to the software client. The final image is then downsampled (in a very high quality fashion) before being displayed on the screen.

The biggest challenges in development occurred (and continue to occur) due to the million ways an application can list resolutions, chose one, check it and so on. And it gets far harder if a game uses the mouse, with the billion and one ways you can get the mouse position in Windows. Furthermore, the whole interceptor environment is not really conducive to easy debugging, which is currently holding up scripting integration.

[TheGreatGooter]

I'm running an oldschool DELL E228WFP (1680 x 1050) at 1440p right now off of a GTX 570 and CS GO looks great with this plus 16xQ CSAA.

[BeastChan23]

I ran the AMD solution a while ago, mostly to beef up the quality in League of Legends, it worked for a while but a few days later stopped, the resolutions are available. I'd guess the registry hack stopped working since I also installed the IGP drivers to use Intel Quick Sync on OBS

[MrYuriy]

Guys, please let me know your results.

 

I've never heard of this... Pretty dang interesting!

[GDylan]

Awesome, got my 1080p BenQ RL2455 running at 3200x1800, couldn't get the screen any higher, but gonna tinker with the manual settings. Got my gtx 670 gigabyte card with a dvi cable, got the witcher 2 running on ultra, no FXAA (why bother) and no ubersampling at around 33 fps average 28ish min, This is sweet.

[ItsLinkNotZelda]

Nice post. Thanks for taking the time to make it.

I'm guessing this will also raise memory requirements for games. Would a 770 2GB be able to handle modern games using this technique to down sample to 1080P?

[QUICKSORT]

This will only work for a few games I think as showed on that 1st example of that character. Those are games where the internal resolution look like it's lower. Most console ports indeed look like that, and also a few other. However on normal games, normal AA would be better I think, because when downsampling, 1st of all you can't use complex algorithms such as lancsoz so you might end up making it more blurry due to poor scaling algorithms used for per frame performance.
 

The AA effect of 4xmsaa is better than 1440p Downsampling, with better performance. It might indeed have better texture and meshes quality on certain games as mentioned above, but for modern games that already have good quality, this would be a waste of resources. In the end I don't think people are that much eager to see quality.

 

But of course if you have a beast of a GPU(s) and you can run 4K DS no sweat, then why not. I'd do it too of course.

[Damien C]

Had a look at this myself and found my monitor will go up to 2560x1600 @ 60hz and will not go any higher on the resolution or refresh rate.

 

My monitor is a AOC E2795VH and I am running Dual 780Ti's going to give some games a try now.

[Jodomcfrodo]

Asus VS238 1080p, EVGA 780 TI classified, 8.1

 

Wouldn't go higher AT ALL. it would display 2650 x 1440p but it had terrible color. Also 2048 x 1152 worked but the colors were terrible. It's not much higher than 1920 x 1080. Can I over volt my monitor? LOL

[mwilsonii]

Wow this actually worked great for me. I followed the instructions in the video,

then I opened BF4 and changed the resolution and turned of AA, and the picture

is really good. I was really surprised my card could handle it because of the age

of my build. I've been waiting for X99 to upgrade.

 

Monitor: Samsung UN32EH5000FXZA 32" 1080p LED Backlit TV

OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro

CPU: Intel Core i7 2700K Overclocked to 4.5 GHz w/ Corsair H100 & Noctua Fans

RAM: Corsair Vengance LP 16GB DDR3 @ 2133MHz

MB: Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 Revision 1.3 w/ New UEFI Update

SSD: 2x Corsair Force Series GT 240GB in RAID 0 (Yes, I do daily backups to my FreeNAS box.)

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified ULTRA+ 03G-P3-1595-AR

NIC: ATTO FastFrame NT12 Dual Port 10GBASE-T NIC (Linked for 20Gbps)

(I used the ATTO card instead of Intel because this machine is dual purpose. It is also

a Hackintosh so I can use it as my DAW and video editing workstation. And I needed

Windows and OS X support.)

 

I think that is all of the pertinent information.

 

Thanks Again,

Mitch

[WereCat]

So I tried it. Highest resolution I got my monitor to is 3200x1800 60Hz. In League of Legends I cant use this resolution because then my mouse cursor will be invisible the highest resolution in League of Legends I can get to without making cursor invisible is 2560x1440.

In Guild Wars 2 it was all fine. But I cant tell much of a difference with downsampling when I have SmartScreen enabled on my monitor which is a really neat feature that actualy works better than anti-aliasing to improve visuals. 

On desktop it looks terrible. But I did noticed very small improvement in games so I will use it as long as I can get stable playable FPS.

Using  (monitor EIZO Foris FS 2333) i7 4770k and GTX 770 on 1080p in GW2 I had around 110 FPS, using 3200x1800 I got around 75 FPS which is really nice... everything maxed out.

[Tassadar]

Didn't work for me. Tried changing to 1440p. I have 2x GTX 660 TI's and my monitor is the ASUS VG278H. When I try to apply the custom res, a error popup is displayed. It says "your monitor doesn't support this resolution"

[Mysticode]

Running at 2560x1600, but my Windows is very blurry now. Guess my monitor doesn't like the res? It's a 1900x1200.

[AnotherTechGuy]

.

[matin94]

admin edit: added video inspired by this thread.

 

 

WARNING: I haven't seen anyone encountering this but just like overclocking, there is an inherent risk of damaging your display and it may not be covered by its warranty. It may not even be able to achieve the same settings other people are able to get.

 

Note: I did not make this guide but have used it on all of my monitors without any problems. Credits are due to the ones that originally posted these on another forum. 

 

What this guide is all about is how to get higher resolutions than what your display is capable of. It is called Downsampling. What it basically does is to have your GPU artificially push a resolution that's over what your display is able to do. The impact it will have on your GPU is equivalent to what it would do on a display that can actually output that resolution natively.

 

For example:

Your display is natively able to support a resolution up to 1920x1080. Using Downsampling it will send out a signal to tell your display to output a resolution of 2560x1440. Now on a display that can output a maximum resolution of 1080p has about 2 million pixels while a 1440p display outputs 3.7 million. Downsampling does not increase the amount of pixels being displayed. Itcan't go beyond that. What it does is bring that 1440p resolution to your 1080p display and compresses it to fit inside the screen. The effect it has is similar to zooming out on a lower resolution picture.

 

Below, you can see the difference in image quality on both images taken on the same display. Both images are using the same settings but with different resolutions.

 

 

Downsampling guide for NVIDIA cards: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=509076

 

Downsampling guide for AMD cards: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=366244

When i try to change the resolution from the AND downsampling GUI, it give me an error, i press enter, it shuts it down

 

.

[xAcid9]

When i try to change the resolution from the AND downsampling GUI, it give me an error, i press enter, it shuts it down

 

.

 

You need to edit the registry yourself, you only need to use the utility to ENABLE the registry entry.

[matin94]

You need to edit the registry yourself, you only need to use the utility to ENABLE the registry entry.

how do i do that, by utility do u mean the CCC? and where abouts is it?

[padi]

Does not work on mobile GPU's with Optimus. Quite bad, i have a nice GT740M, which can handle high resolution quite good.

[earwigy1990]

So I gave it a try in BF4. OH MAN WHAT A DIFFERENCE! Only problem is the forced res crashed the game within seconds after I took these shots. I have to find a way to make this stable because the difference in tessellation is night and day!

 

[StareX]

Nice, but black bars.. how to remove them?

 

I'm running with the Acer x193w 75Hz, 1440x900 monitor. (FML)

 

with a gtx 560 ti. 2560x1440 feels nice on BF4... 60-80fps

and 1920x1080 is really great 90-120fps ...

[xAcid9]

how do i do that, by utility do u mean the CCC? and where abouts is it?

 

I use this guide, it's newer than OP in that thread.

 

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4771086&postcount=653

 

Does not work on mobile GPU's with Optimus. Quite bad, i have a nice GT740M, which can handle high resolution quite good.

 

I don't think it will ever work on laptop muxless GPUs.

[Gullerback]

Only went as high as 1440p on a BenQ G2222HDH and a 760, Worked great tried it on a few games.   Tomb Raider looked fantastic, tho oddly I didn't lose a single frame from what i would normally get on 1080p.   AC Blackflag is a HUGE difference.

[gill1036]

I have got 1440p set up as a custom resolution and it tested fine, but i cannot get it to pick this resolution up when im playing dota 2.

 

Am i missing something ?? 

[matin94]

 

I use this guide, it's newer than OP in that thread.

 

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4771086&postcount=653

 

 

I don't think it will ever work on laptop muxless GPUs.

right, i have used a modified driver for the monitor, i can now select a 4K resolution for the monitor but not  2560x1440, and because its a different ratio to this monitor, it will not work, it says no signal. so now what do i do? that link you sent, i tried to use it, but when i launch the list.bat file. it says the adlutil isnt detected. when i launch the adlutil file. nothing happens

[d34th25]

Monitor: Philips 227ELPH

OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

CPU: Intel Core i7-4700K Overclocked  4.4 GHz

RAM: Kingston 2x2GB 1333MHz

MB: MSI Z87-G45 Gaming BIOS1.7

GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SuperClocked 2GB

 

Resolutions achieved:

3200x1800

2800x1620

2560x1440