I know there are some people here who are really knowledgeable about GPUs, drivers and graphics config, so, as someone who uses a 1920x1080 monitor, I wanted to ask, what is best in terms of performance between;

• Using DSR in the Nvidia Control panel, to set a higher resolution, let's say 2304x1296 (1.2), with no change to render scaling in MSFS,

and

• Not using DSR (keeping resolution at 1920x1080), and using Render Scaling to set the same render resolution, of say 2304x1296 (1.2) ?

 

Of course, I can test this in MSFS 🙂 - I am just wondering if anyone has any technical knowledge as to why one would be better than the other, in terms of performance (I'm thinking solely of performance here, not visuals).

Thanks in advance for any views.

Edited August 15, 20214 yr by JYW

In theory they should be largely the same, I think it'd be hard to give a universally applicable answer on which would be "better", if either.  I've never really seen a noticeable difference between DSR and in-app resolution scaling where it's available in general, but I haven't done specific testing with MSFS. 

One thing to note is that a minor disadvantage of DSR is that it will adjust everything, including the size of the user interface, and unless your application is hip to it you can end up with menus and icons becoming a lot smaller unless there is a UI scaling setting you can use to counteract that.   Generally, setting resolution scaling within the game itself won't affect the UI scale the same way.

Another thing to note if you're wanting to do comparisons is that DSR factors are represented in total pixel count, whereas the resolution scaling in game is a linear measure, meaning "200" render scaling is the same as a 4x DSR factor, not a 2x.

Having tried both, I think that at lower values (like 120 in your case) the resolution scaling looks good enough, but at higher values DSR looks much better. The resolution scaling tends to create a very sharp downscaled output (even with the sharpening filter disabled), which brings out aliasing a lot.

I would recommend experimenting with both, and particularly the DSR smoothness factor.

Thanks very much for the replies guys.   I did some of my own testing a couple of days back, and found that while DSR looks narrowly higher definition, it comes with a much larger performance penalty than Render Scaling, at the same resolution effect. So I've stuck with keeping DSR off, and render scaling at 120%.    If flying simple aircraft, in less complex scenery, I can get away with render scaling at 140% - it looks really great but if I'm in a more complex model, or in busy scenery areas, I do see a performance penalty, so 120% is my go to setting. 👍

9 minutes ago, JYW said:

Thanks very much for the replies guys.   I did some of my own testing a couple of days back, and found that while DSR looks narrowly higher definition, it comes with a much larger performance penalty than Render Scaling, at the same resolution effect. So I've stuck with keeping DSR off, and render scaling at 120%.    If flying simple aircraft, in less complex scenery, I can get away with render scaling at 140% - it looks really great but if I'm in a more complex model, or in busy scenery areas, I do see a performance penalty, so 120% is my go to setting. 👍

Your specs?

40 minutes ago, earthdog said:

Your specs?

My specs are modest:   i7 4790k 3.8Ghz, 32GB RAM and GTX 1080 6GB.

I would highly recommend using the build in render scale. Couple reasons for that:

1- NVIDIA DSR requires to be run in fullscreen exclusive mode, and will look signifantly more blurry if not using a perfect 4X resolution (which is essentially 4K for 1080P).

2- The built in render scale, when coupled with TAA, uses temporal upscaling / downscaling, and is significantly sharper when using arbitrary resolutions (eg: 80% of 4K or 140% of 1080P).

 

Make no mistake here, I'm a HUGE fan of DSR, especially for older games that have no proper anti aliasing, but coupled with temporal reconstruction, modern solutions like render scaling are usually better.