[Suggestion] Low res renderer

Hello.

There's been some talk around here earlier about how rendering performance is impacted by resolution. When we use webgl shaders they seem to be rendered after everything has been scaled up instead of before, which means the higher your desktop resolution the greater the strain on the gpu. I see this on my own computer; when a game with several shaders renders at 2x scale everything is slick but bump it up to 3x and things start to get jittery. And yep, my drivers are relatively fresh.

Shader effects often don't need to get rendered at any more than the non-scaled game resolution, or maybe 2x game resolution. So, could we please have some kind of 1x and/or 2x rendering option that gets scaled up to fullscreen after all the gpu-intensive work is done? I remember Ashley mentioned this kind of thing as a possible solution and I really hope you guys will consider it. A possible extra benefit: If everything is drawn at 1x res first then scaled up we could get a realtime toggle for point and linear sampling maybe. Yes? Sounds good, right? :)))

+1 though this sort of differs from what I've agreed/requested in the past. I like the concept of the computers resolution changing, as a game that's 1024x648 at 20fps for example, would be squished into a 640x480 window, which hones a great deal of FPS boost for some users (Goes up to 50/60fps). If a game was 1024x768 20fps and could be upscaled more without fps loss, that's great!, except, no GAIN of FPS for users that have weak computer, it'd still be 20fps (better than how it would work now where it would DROP to like 0fps lol <img src="smileys/smiley16.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> )

Hope I made sense!

It's not just the shaders, it's everything. C2 doesn't just scale up your graphics from 1x to 4x or whatever, it totally redraws them in a higher resolution. Looks terrible for low-res games since they start using "sub-pixels". Pixel rounding doesn't fix it.

Don't forget it works the other way too. If the game is downscaled, shaders run faster, and with your change it would be slower because they'd render a larger area which is then resized down. It's requested a lot though, so we might look in to what can be done towards this.

YES. Even C2's simple shaders perform sluggishly at high resolutions.

It's requested a lot though, so we might look in to what can be done towards this.

YAY (Even though this is a "might") <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

+1,00000

btw that's exactly what Halfbrick (of Jetpack Joyride fame) did to get a higher FPS with their game resolution on iPads,

and no one complained :)

Very cool, thanks for considering it :)

Ashley

Well you could always have it as an optional mode in which is recommended only for use on upscaling a low resolution window.

Sounds like a lot better idea than the current Pixel Rounding system for retro/pixel style games.

Ashley

Well you could always have it as an optional mode in which is recommended only for use on upscaling a low resolution window.

Sounds like a lot better idea than the current Pixel Rounding system for retro/pixel style games.

I'd prefer it to be optional myself, with toggles for 1x and 2x "internal" scaling. Useful for cases where you might need a larger than 1x scale, like turning trilinear filtering on/off during runtime. If everything gets rendered to a single texture that's upscaled afterwards it should be relatively easy to turn off filtering just for that final texture to avoid it being applied twice? Just thinking out loud here.

So um, not to nag but have you made any decision on whether or not to look into this? It's kind of crucial performance-wise I think.

Has this been looked at? My game runs well in a window but in fullscreen the frame rate drops quite significantly.

Changing screen resolution is on to do list.