Dumb question about low res and Upscaling

Hello,

I just want to be sure to understand what is going on when you work with a pixel art game at low resolution. (in my case 640x360)

If my monitor is 1920x1200 and I play my game in high quality fullscreen, the game will be upscaled X3 to fit the screen ?

And that upscale seems to be greedy for not too powerful machine.

On my laptop in 1920x1200, my game with no shader runs at 30/40 fps in high quality (and is unplayable). BUT if I set my laptop monitor at 1280x720, I get smooth 60fps all shaders on! HELL!

So if I understand, the lower the game resolution is, the worse fps you get in high quality because of the upscale. Am I right?

If so, is there a trick or a solution ?

It's quite annoying because the game is originally in 640x360 and changing the monitor resolution impact the FPS but not the quality!

If you have a pixel game in theory the upscale shouldn't matter (much) - at low quality it is rendered at your base resolution and stretched out - in theory this means more cohesive presentation (no rotated pixels, etc), all the pixel-based shaders work right, etc.

With high quality you get the same assets stretched individually to fill the screen, so, quite likely, fillrates get blown, pixel-based shaders act weird and so on.

It depends on personal preference and art style, but I would always go for the "low quality" options.

IIRC, for a game that uses pixellated graphics (point sampling), high quality fullscreen and low quality fullscreen will have a similar appearance (unless there are text objects I think, but having text objects in a pixelly style game is unlikely), so the low one is the way to go.

other than that, if your game uses node webkit, I would suggest doing a launcher that , if fullscreen is chosen, change the monitor résolution before launching the game (in kiosk mode, as in that case you do not want the users to be able to quit the fullscreen mode, which would actually work similarly to older PC games), and that will change it back afterwards, not sure why this is not actually supported by node webkit.

if your game is for the web however, not sure there is a solution other than suggesting your users to do so.

There is a huge difference between low and high quality for Text and Shaders.

Try a scanline or a bulb effect. You will see the difference.

Aphrodite How can you force a monitor resolution change at launch? I have no idea how to do that.

Of course there is. This is is what I meant by pixel-based Shaders acting differently - with low res the Shader is run at the game resolution, no matter what. If you put a scanline on a 360px tall layer then your image will get 180 scanlines and that's it. Now when you use high quality upscaling the effect will be used on all of the 1080 pixels, for example. It will look totally different. On a 720 screen it will look different again.

Somebody So in low quality, a shader will always look the same whatever the monitor resolution, but not in high quality. I got it?

You got it!

At least a Shader that uses pixels for sizes, such as Scanlines and all of my pushy/shifty ones

There is a huge difference between low and high quality for Text and Shaders.

Try a scanline or a bulb effect. You will see the difference.

Aphrodite How can you force a monitor resolution change at launch? I have no idea how to do that.

not sure, all I know is that older games do this (and so, is doable by a program such as a launcher), however my knowledge stops here, perhaps there are applications or command lines to do this exactly maybe?