Resolutions and AA?

[nosisab Ken Keleh]

So after about 15 minutes of examination on a 1080p monitor (so they are native) from 2-3 is huge, 3-4 is very minor (almost entirely unnoticeable) and then from 4-10 the only difference is distant textures look better. (check the door and steps) almost like an anisotropic filter. at 10x i can honestly say distant textures look as good as they do on the HD collection. I am curious though, Why is it only distant textures seem to increase vastly while normal textures, and by that i mean closer, do not when using past 3x scaling?

There is another interesting thing i see happening as well. When using above 4x scaling, it seems to have an Aliasing effect. As Tidus' leg is definitely more jagged on 10x than 4x

Theoretically aliasing should not happen, but since there is upscale followed by downscale, should not be surprise something might be lost in middle of the mess. Let alone using many times the needed power to develop the same (or very similar) work.

[Gvaz]

If there is aliasing, it's because the downscaled resolution is not a 1:1 ratio (3840x2160 -> 1920x1080, ex)

also distant textures increase in fidelity because of the supersampling effect going on. close ones do not increase because they've already been displaying at max quality. This is why when upscaling textures tend to look better because 1. supersampling effect, and 2. the textures themselves were already somewhat highres, they were just blurry or barely decipherable at native res. That's the "gist" anyways

[nosisab Ken Keleh]

If there is aliasing, it's because the downscaled resolution is not a 1:1 ratio (3840x2160 -> 1920x1080, ex)

also distant textures increase in fidelity because of the supersampling effect going on. close ones do not increase because they've already been displaying at max quality. This is why when upscaling textures tend to look better because 1. supersampling effect, and 2. the textures themselves were already somewhat highres, they were just blurry or barely decipherable at native res. That's the "gist" anyways

I didn't understand, but whatever, it's beyond the point, the jaggedness if it exist at all would be too subtle also to make any significant difference.

So the original question stands still: Should those unable to go beyond 4x be such frustrated? my personal opinion is "no", at least not to play PS2 emulated games. But if one want to overtax the machine for almost nihil return, that's OK as well.

PS: Besides, this "race" for graphical gimmish is making people to forget (or never knowing) what is really important in a game.

[Tame]

Yeah after 4x on 1080p there's not much difference, if you look very closely (you really need to open pictures full size and drag window sliders at the same position) you can see that it gets a tiny bit sharper (characters and menus) at 6x and 10x (lol). I tested 6x native with 2x AA and 16x AA and there's honestly no difference there... I'm also using override anisotropic filtering 16x in CCC but I don't think that makes much of a difference.

Since FFX runs pretty lightly, I've been playing FFX at 6x native + 2x AA and disabling frame limiting still gives pretty huge boost.

There's the border at some point when your GPU chokes and performance drops drastically, not sure how much CPU plays part in increased resolutions.

In Gran Turismo 4 for example I can only use 3x native to keep fps 60 +...

[Laraul]

I thought native resolution was the resolution value that appears in the window titlebar. In FFX it's 512x416 for example. A varies from game to game and sometimes within the game. So 2x for FFX is 1024x832. 4x is 2048x1664. And so forth.

[Laraul]

So the original question stands still: Should those unable to go beyond 4x be such frustrated? my personal opinion is "no", at least not to play PS2 emulated games. But if one want to overtax the machine for almost nihil return, that's OK as well.

I personally don't care about resolution of PS2 games. Which is why I prefer playing them with a PS3 when I can. And in game like "Mega Man Anniversary Collection", native and 100x are going to look identical. So if your frustrated play a game like this. As long as it's not "Gradius III & IV".

[Koji]

I thought native resolution was the resolution value that appears in the window titlebar. In FFX it's 512x416 for example. A varies from game to game and sometimes within the game. So 2x for FFX is 1024x832. 4x is 2048x1664. And so forth.

This is exactly right.

The reason why 4x tends to be "just right" is that few people have monitors/TVs over 1080p, and 4x in most cases puts it a decent bit above that.

[nosisab Ken Keleh]

This is exactly right.

The reason why 4x tends to be "just right" is that few people have monitors/TVs over 1080p, and 4x in most cases puts it a decent bit above that.

Yes, the ideal case is always the native resolution the monitor is able, but the pointed relation is constant indeed, after interpolating the nearest points, further interpolations become increasingly less effective in making the image looking better. This is aggravated due to the monitor will have to do it's own work rescaling, if it will do it better than the internal upscale is open question, securely if it just stretches things it will be for worst.

The downside is the upscale may be trickier with some games and artifacts might be introduced depending on the custom ratio, and sometimes the native multiplier is the wrong way to go and a custom upscale may look better... it's a case by case issue with no set rules. gladly most the games will look OK with whatever upscale used.

[Tame]

I did some further tests on FFX and seems that the ultimate solution for me is to use 1920x1080 custom resolution, no msaa in PCSX2, but force super sampling AA in CCC instead! That way thin lines etc look better than rendering in X times native and then downscaling, also the built in super sampling algorithms are much faster to use. Here's another series of images for interested showing the FFX spheregrid with a number of settings.

Native, no AA (honestly can it look this bad?)


2x Native, no AA


3x Native, no AA


4x Native, no AA


6x Native, no AA


6x Native, 2x MSAA


1080p, no AA


1080p, 2x SSAA


1080p. 8x SSAA