VooDooPC April 3, 2013 Share VooDooPC Member April 3, 2013 (edited) I was bored so I wanted to try out downsampling screenshots. For anyone that doesn't know it's a simple technique used to get better looking screenshots. I'm a total newb at it since I've just been messing around with it today. The basic concept is you force your video card to run a game at a really high resolution, slap all the anti-aliasing on it you can, even if it runs at 5fps. You then take your screenshot and rescale it in Photoshop to a lower resolution. This keeps the texture clarity and edge crispness of the higher resolution but scaled to a lower resolution, it looks really good. Bioshock Infinite is using in game AA, I'm not sure if it's multisampling or just something like FXAA. Mass Effect 3 in 1080p is highest in game settings with AA, their AA isn't great. The downsampled screenshot uses 4x multisampling and 4x SGSSAA. World of Tanks is only using in game AA, which is FXAA. Gear Up is using in game AA, I think it's multisampling... maybe... I've been trying out a number of games I have installed. The result is best when you throw on a bunch of extra AA on, like I did with Mass Effect 3. I've been working with the Nvidia Inspector to put 4x multisampling and 4x SGSSA on more games. You can learn more about downsampling here: http://www.tested.co...ample-pc-games/ Edited April 4, 2013 by VooDooPC 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Girlzilla April 4, 2013 Share Girlzilla Member April 4, 2013 My PC just goes Kapooya! when I try to make it run higher. I like the screenshots. I want my Bioshock Infinite like that! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VooDooPC April 4, 2013 Author Share VooDooPC Member April 4, 2013 It takes a bit of finicking to find out the maximum resolution your PC can handle. Here's more of very early Bioshock Infinite: And yes, I upload them to some random German site... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VooDooPC April 4, 2013 Author Share VooDooPC Member April 4, 2013 (edited) Crysis 3: Battlefield 3: Edited April 4, 2013 by VooDooPC Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walkingCat April 4, 2013 Share walkingCat Member April 4, 2013 Wow gotta try! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Girlzilla April 4, 2013 Share Girlzilla Member April 4, 2013 It takes a bit of finicking to find out the maximum resolution your PC can handle. Here's more of very early Bioshock Infinite: And yes, I upload them to some random German site... For some reason it won't let me view em - I click on the link and the pic begins to download, but then Google pops up and asks me if I want to translate the page and I say no, and then BAM! The pic doesn't load. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VooDooPC April 4, 2013 Author Share VooDooPC Member April 4, 2013 I will host them somewhere else tonight. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Girlzilla April 4, 2013 Share Girlzilla Member April 4, 2013 No need - I just retried it and ignored the Google pop-up and I see them now! So awesomely crispy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JenLove April 7, 2013 Share JenLove Member April 7, 2013 I wanna try that downsampling. I find it fun just looking at those screen shots. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sky April 10, 2013 Share Sky Member April 10, 2013 There are forms of anti-aliasing in some games that already do this; however, it requires an amount of memory that exponentially increases as the amount of pixels increases. It can also cause unexpected issues, and since most machines can't handle it in a playable fashion, a lot of graphics programmers don't implement it. There are other methods to acquire much better graphics display; both in how it looks and the memory it requires. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VooDooPC April 10, 2013 Author Share VooDooPC Member April 10, 2013 There are forms of anti-aliasing in some games that already do this; however, it requires an amount of memory that exponentially increases as the amount of pixels increases. It can also cause unexpected issues, and since most machines can't handle it in a playable fashion, a lot of graphics programmers don't implement it. There are other methods to acquire much better graphics display; both in how it looks and the memory it requires. Downsampling is really the basis of all anti-aliasing. The original anti-aliasing method, supersampling, was basically just rendering things at a higher resolution and scaling them down to your monitor resolution. And yeah, as you said it's way too resource intensive. Then from supersampling they went to multisampling, which uses some aspects of supersampling but in a way that has much better performance, but it also doesn't look as sharp. Now they have things like FXAA which are shader based, it has very little impact on performance but also doesn't look great, it basically just blurs the edges instead of actually anti-aliasing them. Running SSAA, MSAA, SMAA, TXAA, FXAA or any other anti-aliasing you want and downsampling will look much better for screenshots than just increasing the resolution larger than your monitor. It's like having anti-aliasing ontop of anti-aliasing. Even having a bunch of anti-aliasing on and scaling 3200x1800 down to 1080p, the screenshots of the game look better than the game did running in real time. I'm guessing this is partly due to Photoshop's bicubic resampling, I think it does a better job of keeping the sharpness of the higher resolution than the scaling on my monitor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VooDooPC May 18, 2013 Author Share VooDooPC Member May 18, 2013 Metro: Last Light Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.