Downscaling 4K to 1080p on one game...

[flibberdipper]

So there is one game I have now that I really like to play. Problem is, it will happily run at close to 2000FPS, which introduces a LOT of coil whine from my 7950. I was hoping there was a way to run it at 4K so that maybe the framerate will drop and then there will be less coil whine. Any tips?

[david cassar]

So there is one game I have now that I really like to play. Problem is, it will happily run at close to 2000FPS, which introduces a LOT of coil whine from my 7950. I was hoping there was a way to run it at 4K so that maybe the framerate will drop and then there will be less coil whine. Any tips?

Why not use vsync to cap the frames?

[Najuno]

So there is one game I have now that I really like to play. Problem is, it will happily run at close to 2000FPS, which introduces a LOT of coil whine from my 7950. I was hoping there was a way to run it at 4K so that maybe the framerate will drop and then there will be less coil whine. Any tips?

Just set a FPS Limit and you will be fine.

[N4dez]

What games runs at 2000fps? lol

Use vsync or a frame limiter thingie in the drivers.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

 

So there is one game I have now that I really like to play. Problem is, it will happily run at close to 2000FPS, which introduces a LOT of coil whine from my 7950. I was hoping there was a way to run it at 4K so that maybe the framerate will drop and then there will be less coil whine. Any tips?

 

 

Update: Black Zero over at Guru3D put together a more thorough guide that will likely be updated from here on. I recommend checking it out if you have any questions.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=366244



Before I start, I use a base resolution of 1080p, so I've only tested it at that resolution, and in Windows 7. It should work with other resolutions, though.

I want to give all the credit to this motherfucker over here, Mr. Lolman. It's amazingly simple and it works. (It's in German, and I don't speak German, but I was able to figure it out pretty easily.)

First, make sure GPU scaling is OFF. (seems backwards, I know)



Basically, you download his little program, AMDdownsamplingGUI (aptly named) here, then open the .jar file, click "Erstellen," and you'll see:



Then change the following numbers to 2560x1440 (NOTE: In order to properly downsample the image, you have to first select 2560x1440. I'll explain a bit more below) then click "OK" to create the resolution.



Now, open up your display properties and you should have the new resolution in your list. 



Clicked "Advanced settings" and uncheck this box: 



or you'll get this message. 

Now, select the new resolution and your desktop should scale properly. You can now start a game in 2560x1440 and it will be downsampled accordingly.

Now, if you're wanting a higher resolution, or a proper 16:9 resolution such as 2880x1620, you can repeat the steps above to create that resolution, but to get it to scale properly you must first choose 2560x1440, then from there selecting the 16:9 resolution will work. 

The program was designed with 2560 in mind, from what I gather, so that's just how it works. If you choose 2880x1620 (for example) first, you'll only see a corner of your desktop as the image won't be properly scaled. 

IMPORTANT: Before you shut down Windows, make sure your resolution's not higher than 2560x1440 or you'll get a black screen upon restart. If that happens, just hit F8 and boot into 640x480.

Try it out and share your experiences below. The more feedback the better.
 

I uploaded it to another place that doesn't have ads or shitty click throughs to get it:

http://minus.com/mAcc3RHPQ/

 

EDIT : For nvidia users, just go to Nvidia control panal and enable DSR or just use Gforce experience and turn on DSR, no need to follow lengthy process, but if you still want to try more than 4k, follow this link :

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=509076

[Timopomer]

or get an nvidea GPU

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

or get an nvidea GPU

He has a AMD card, there are ways AMD users can also do downsampling, you can't say buy Nvidia to have those features, even AMD users can use Physx.

[Timopomer]

He has a AMD card, there are ways AMD users can also do downsampling, you can't say buy Nvidia to have those features, even AMD users can use Physx.

not advanced,also yea they can.

 

but its complicated and pointless.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

not advanced,also yea they can.

 

but its complicated and pointless.

what not advance can you please elaborate ? 

it's not any more complicated than nvidia's steps, just because a Rolex watch mechanics is so complicated to change anything doesn't mean it's pointless, surround setup is much more easier in AMD than nvidia doesn't mean i should go get an AMD. and it doesn't certainly doesn't make it pointless .

[Coswar]

not advanced,also yea they can.

 

but its complicated and pointless.

You're being ridiculous if you want him to spend money on a GPU for the sake of one game And anyway this is @tmcclelland455 , he doesn't spend money

[Timopomer]

You're being ridiculous if you want him to spend money on a GPU for the sake of one game And anyway this is @tmcclelland455 , he doesn't spend money

 

i didnt say he should,but i think for the sake of getting less FPS its pointless and complicated.

with an nvidia gpu it would be 2 clicks and he could test it.

 

also why not just limit fps? i usually do 2Xrefreshrate         +1

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

i didnt say he should,but i think for the sake of getting less FPS its pointless and complicated.

with an nvidia gpu it would be 2 clicks and he could test it.

 

also why not just limit fps? i usually do 2Xrefreshrate         +1

doesn't matter how many clicks i have to go through, no one is dumb enough spend their moeny to buy a different graphics card just so it's easier to change a few things,

also, you just said it's not advance, you still haven't explained why AMD cards are not advance. what is your definition of advance ? 

[typographie]

but its complicated and pointless.

 

I used to have to use third-party tools to do downsampling prior to Nvidia adding DSR to their driver package. It wasn't that complicated. And it's not pointless if you want the results.  :huh:

 

So there is one game I have now that I really like to play. Problem is, it will happily run at close to 2000FPS, which introduces a LOT of coil whine from my 7950. I was hoping there was a way to run it at 4K so that maybe the framerate will drop and then there will be less coil whine. Any tips?

 

I'm going to skip the pleasantries and assume that vsync isn't an option for this game for whatever reason. I think Radeon Pro allows you to set custom framerate limits and/or force vsync. I haven't used it myself as I haven't owned an AMD card for a long time, but it's the tool that gets recommended a lot.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

you are awkwardly mad

 

advanced physx in that context

you're just assuming that i'm mad, i'm being reasonable here.

you're saying Nvidia is advance it's just because it has a Physx? it's just a tech demo when it came, it had and still has no real imact to gaming, hell consoles didn't even have phsyx in them and they played the game just fine, you'll never find a game where you can't turn off physx and play the game like the rest of the world, physx is jsut for eye candy, doesn't make nvidia advanced than AMD in any way

[SteveGrabowski]

What games runs at 2000fps? lol

Use vsync or a frame limiter thingie in the drivers.

Can you turn VSync on for Solitaire?

[typographie]

you're saying Nvidia is advance it's just because it has a Physx?

 

He was referring to "Advanced PhysX," the name they occasionally give it in options menus. I think Metro Last Light called it that. It's just an arbitrary name with a hint of marketing sprinkled in.

 

Also this argument is dumb and doing nothing to help the OP.

[xAcid9]

Either use this hack to enable VSR on your 7950 with Catalyst 15.3 

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=397924

 

or install the leaked 15.2 driver.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=397877

[flibberdipper]

Why not use vsync to cap the frames?

 

Just set a FPS Limit and you will be fine.

 

What games runs at 2000fps? lol

Use vsync or a frame limiter thingie in the drivers.

Game doesn't have a frame limiter of any kind.

 

or get an nvidea GPU

I have an Nvidia card with my AMD card. It's a GTX 480, so DSR won't work on it.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

I have an Nvidia card with my AMD card. It's a GTX 480, so DSR won't work on it.

it does , use this guide, i've did it in my 560ti trust me it works on all cards now, just go to control panel and enable it , it you don't find that option, you can create one yourself 

What you need 

An Nvidia GPU ( use this for downsampling on AMD cards ), Windows 7 ( SOME people have issues with this method on Windows 8 ) and 10 minutes worth of patience. From my own experience going from 4xx to 5xx and 6xx series the downsampling compatibility has become better. Everything written here has been tested and has worked for me on the following setup :

Dell u2312hm 1920x1080@60 hz monitor -> Single link DVI-D to HDMI -> Gigabyte GTX 670, 310.64 Gefore Drivers. Downsampling can be very finicky across different driver versions but apparently any recent set of Geforce drivers should be compatible, version 300.xx and newer. 

What is downsampling

Downsampling, also called OGSSAA : Ordered Grid SuperSampling AntiAliasing, is in this case the concept of rendering the game at a much higher, custom made, resolution than your monitor is capable of displaying and subsequently having the GPU rescale the image ( as in downsample ) to that of your monitor's native resolution to which the end result is a "cleaner", sharper and less aliased image. 

Why

King of all AA methods, affects virtually every kind of aliasing but it's also very taxing which is why we have other less demanding alternatives, SMAA, MLAA, FXAA etc. Sadly we are in a position where we have pc-games shipping with "AA on/off" options or have AA implementations that leads much to be desired making people use other forms of externally forced AA. 

We're also at a point in this "generation" where the discrepancy between pc and console hardware is bigger than ever giving pc-users a much larger performance overhead. What I mean by that is that there are a lot of people out there with hardware that can run many/most new games and virtually any older game at higher resolutions than 1920x1080 while still maintaining an acceptable framerate even though 1920x1080 is still the standard resolution of most of our monitors. 

Using downsampling you almost never will have to worry about a game's image quality being ruined by lack of AA since it works in almost any 3D game out there. Compared to other types of AA solutions like SMAA/FXAA-injectors or "Nvidia Inspector AA" you won't need to fiddle with settings or files at all, when it comes to downsampling via custom resolution once you got it up and running it's just a matter of using that resolution in any game and presto you got yourself some AA brewing. It is worth pointing at that downsampling still works great with those aforementioned AA methods ( injectors, inspector etc ) and whatever kind of AA solution/s the games you want to play offer, you can mix,match and stack AA to your heart's content. 

How 

There are guides out there that go much more in depth in the process, one of them is this thread/guide at Guru3D showing the step by step guide on how to reach your own maximum custom resolution. The problem is that following those guides myself I've noticed that the end result is almost random at times, giving me different max resolution depending on things like drivers rather than which settings I ended up using. In the end, the best method I've found is to simply straight up copy other people's settings ( this is by no means a guarantee that it'll work but hopefully it removes a lot of the hassles of trying to stumble across your own max resolution one pixel at a time ) and hope for the best.

1) Right click your desktop and start "Nvidia Control Panel" -> go to "Adjust desktop size and position" under "Display".

Use these settings ; Scaling mode : Aspect ratio, Perform Scaling on : GPU, Check "Override the scaling mode set by games and programs"

2) Go to "Change resolution" under "Display", Press "Customize", tick the box "Enable Resolutions not exposed by the display" -> Press "Create custom resolution" 

-ATTENTION-

3)At this point, for the "lower" resolutions, people might not even need to do further tweaking than to simply write their desired resolution in the following window. Simply replace the "1920" with "2560" and "1080" with "1440" for a desired resolution of 2560x1440. Leave timings to automatic

Press test and one of the following will happen :

- You get an image, everything works, press save and you got yourself your first downsampling resolution! Just go in-game and change your resolution settings accordingly and you're done! Got to step 4. 

- You get a black ( sometimes flashing red ) screen OR your monitor will tell you the current resolution is not supported : press ESC once or twice and wait for the screen to revert back to normal. If even 2560x1440 didn't work for you then your setup might now jive well with downsampling. Still go to Step 5 and give that a try.

- You get a black screen, monitor goes into power save mode : your shit crashed you gotta manually reboot your pc and the settings will revert back to normal once you're in windows again. If even 2560x1440 didn't work for you then your setup might now jive well with downsampling. Still go to Step 5 and give that a try.

4) If everything worked, you can go higher and try the following two resolutions that are relatively common and tend to work for people who downsample, again without having to resort to manual timings. [All of the mentioned resolutions between

2560x1440 and 3840x2160 are all abitrary 16:9 resolutions but try to use the ones I've tried and know work for myself and a handful of others on GAF.]

2880 x 1620

3200 x 1800

If the above two resolutions won't work at 60 Hz try 59 Hz. 

OK. Following the different guides that exist out there, my own max resolution was 3200x1800 for a long stretch of time. That was until I started copying other people's settings which showed me how arbitrary the results could be. Using person A's settings didn't work but somehow using person B's which used an even higher resolution did without changing anything other than the resolution. But you want an even higher resolution so let's see what we can reach!

5) 3600 x 2025@60 Hz 

Use these settings. Set timings to manual, copy every setting and pray to your deity of preference. Press test and see if it works. This is generally the highest resolution I use when playing games as it is the one where I downsample yet still have it running 

at 60 Hz. It's a good compromise between having a very high resolution and still being able to achieve 60 fps in the games that your pc has enough juice to do so, whereas if you try a lower refresh rate your framerate will obviously be capped accordingly. 

6) Are you still with me? Using the timing settings from the previous resolution ( 3600 x 2025 ) you can go for broke and try 3840x2160. Most people will probably get somekind of black screen at 60 Hz unless you are on some very specific setup. What you can do here is that you lower your refresh rate, the refresh rate variable that is at the top of the window not the bottom one. Some have had luck with 30 Hz even if 59 Hz,58 Hz,57 Hz etc didn't work. This resolution is outside the realm of my setup regardless of the settings I use so I have yet to be able to have a 3840x2160 custom resolution.

Performance

What kind of performance to expect? Roughly speaking your performance will be 1/N, where N is supersample value or "how many times more pixels you're rendering".

Example : When downsampling from 3840x2160 to 1920x1080, which is technically 4XSSAA, you're rendering 4 times as many pixels at 3840x2160 as you are at 1920x1080, so you'll be getting 1/4th performace. E.g, if you have 120 fps at 1920x1080 you'll get 30 fps at 3840x2160 in game X ( barring vram limitations, other bottle necks and everything in between ). 

Issues 

Doesn't appear to be working with laptops and/or "m" line laptop gpus.

Reinstalling drivers clears your custom resolutions so have your own settings written down/saved somewhere. 

For some people using refresh rates that aren't 30 Hz or 60 Hz exact, the custom resolution won't show up ingame OR selecting the resolution in game will make it crash. 

Bandwidth issues - Depending on the way you've hooked up your monitor/gpu you have different maximum bandwidth that can come into play. Interestingly enough, using my monitors dvi output with a single-link DVI cable gave me better results compared to using the displayport ouput which has a higher bandwidth. 

Depending on your general preferences you might notice an increase in input lag as you downsample from a higher resolution. Some people claim they don't notice any kind of increase in inputlag whereas me and my irl buddy and fellow gaffer Tyrantguardian ( both fighting game nerds ) experience a noticeable increase in inputlag in certain games where such a thing is easily noticed.

You can't downsample in games where you use windowed mode unless your desktop is set to the high resolution you want to downsample FROM. 

120 Hz and 3D-gaming : due to current bandwidth limitations it isn't feasible to downsample down to a 1920x1080 resolution @ 120 Hz.

Screenshots

I won't bother with posting a sea of screenshots, for that I'll redirect you to the 2013 High-Res PC Screenshot Thread where you can see how good games can look when using downsampling. I will however post a couple of cropped comparison pics from Dota 2. It's no technical showcase game by any means BUT I do think one thing comes across and that is the visual difference between downsampling and "just" running the game at max settings. This can be quite striking considering you already had the game running at what you thought was the highest visual fidelity. Again these aren't meant to WOW anyone but you will notice that everything that is dependent on resolution will look tangibly better ( certain lighting effects, texture detail, shadow detail, model detail and of course a sharper, less blurry, less aliased image ). 

Images are details cropped and resized x2 from a)1920x1080 and b)1920x1080 downsampled from 3680x2070. Open in separate tabs and flip side by side to see the difference in Dota 2 a game that lack AA options. ( Keep in mind that these are upscaled, here's an example of what it looks like ingame with hud turned off. ) 

 

Bonus Dirt 3 comparison.

 

And for the hell of it, here's some Mirror's Edge using downsampling and ingame AA. 

 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

@tmcclelland455 - First do try this and see if the option exists, yes even a 400 series cards can do DSR 

[flibberdipper]

@tmcclelland455 - First do try this and see if the option exists, yes even a 400 series cards can do DSR 

Okay... By that logic, I might as well just unplug my TV so that my 480 does all the work and not deal with coil whine.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Okay... By that logic, I might as well just unplug my TV so that my 480 does all the work and not deal with coil whine.

let us know how it goes