Render Scaling

[MNORM 20]

I've set the Render Scaling to 150 and the values (numbers) on the CRT screens have an odd shimmer/jaggy visual effect when there's movement of the camera.  But...the overall performance is better than at 200.   It sounds like I may just need to upgrade my monitor to 1440p to effectively eliminate this visual effect.

[David Mills 4,744]

33 minutes ago, MNORM said:

I've set the Render Scaling to 150 and the values (numbers) on the CRT screens have an odd shimmer/jaggy visual effect when there's movement of the camera.  But...the overall performance is better than at 200.   It sounds like I may just need to upgrade my monitor to 1440p to effectively eliminate this visual effect.

Just buy the cheapest 4K TV you can find. They work great with MSFS via HDMI. Regarding the shimmering effect, the SU10 beta eliminates almost all of that.

Edited August 2, 2022 by David Mills

[MNORM 20]

1 minute ago, David Mills said:

Just buy the cheapest 4K TV you can find. They work great with MSFS via HDMI.

I've read the same thing in other places but others say it's best to buy a 4K monitor...and they seem to run more expensive than TVs.  Maybe something to do with refresh rates?

Maybe I need to do more research.  I love how MSFS runs at 30fps...buttery smooth.  I'd just like to eliminate panel jaggy/shimmer.

[David Mills 4,744]

18 minutes ago, MNORM said:

I've read the same thing in other places but others say it's best to buy a 4K monitor...and they seem to run more expensive than TVs.  Maybe something to do with refresh rates?

Maybe I need to do more research.  I love how MSFS runs at 30fps...buttery smooth.  I'd just like to eliminate panel jaggy/shimmer.

Yes, a dedicated computer monitor is of higher quality than a 4K TV (perhaps, maybe, supposedly). But a refresh rate higher than 60Hz (i.e., the refresh rate of a TV) isn't going to do you any good with MSFS, because few people exceed 60 fps in MSFS. Setting a 144 refresh rate on your monitor for a program outputting 30 fps is wasting resources. I personally use a 75-inch 4K Sony TV as my MSFS display. I sit only four feet from it. So the immersion is total and overwhelming. Even if I literally press my nose against the TV, the tiniest of screen text is flawless, even on a 75-inch display, because 4K has essentially equaled the resolution of human vision at that display size and distance. Your computer hardware is infinitely superior to mine, which is seven years old. There is no need for you to suffer the jaggy/shimmer you describe. SU10 beta does go a very long way in eliminating that unwanted effect, again depending on screen resolution and other things.

[Dazzlercee23 66]

3 hours ago, iFlySimX said:

Interesting, I will try this with my 1440p monitor. 

So I would need to set MSFS res to 1080 and then upscale using render?

Try setting MSFS to 1440p and Render Scale to 150. This would force the sim to render at 4k internally, and then downscale to 1440p.

[MNORM 20]

11 minutes ago, Dazzlercee23 said:

Try setting MSFS to 1440p and Render Scale to 150. This would force the sim to render at 4k internally, and then downscale to 1440p.

I'm admittedly not very bright when it comes to this stuff. 

How does your description work if Render Scale is set to 150 and MSFS set to 1080p on a native 1080p monitor?  Trying to wrap my head around this stuff. 

[JacquesBrel 639]

If you have an NVidia card it is probably simpler to use DSR/DLDSR instead of a 100+ render scale. MSFS will simply just think it is running at a higher resolution, and the GPU will be doing the downscaling to the native monitor resolution. And in the case of DLDSR it will maybe do a little better job at eliminating jaggies/shimmer than the MSFS render scaling.

[Dazzlercee23 66]

1 hour ago, MNORM said:

I'm admittedly not very bright when it comes to this stuff. 

How does your description work if Render Scale is set to 150 and MSFS set to 1080p on a native 1080p monitor?  Trying to wrap my head around this stuff. 

That would render internally at 1080 x 150%, so 1620p. MSFS would then downscale the output to your monitor setting, i.e. 1080p.

The output is always at your monitor resolution as set in the sim. The render scale is the percentage of that resolution that the image is rendered at internally before being upscaled or downscaled to your monitor resolution. 

Edited August 2, 2022 by Dazzlercee23

[MNORM 20]

1 hour ago, JacquesBrel said:

If you have an NVidia card it is probably simpler to use DSR/DLDSR instead of a 100+ render scale. MSFS will simply just think it is running at a higher resolution, and the GPU will be doing the downscaling to the native monitor resolution. And in the case of DLDSR it will maybe do a little better job at eliminating jaggies/shimmer than the MSFS render scaling.

No idea what you're referring to.  Is this a setting in NVidia Control Panel?  I've only ever used NVidia Inspector in the past (FS9 & FSX) but I'm simply experimenting within MSFS at the moment.  The only thing I see similar to what you're referencing is a DLAA setting in MSFS.

Edited August 2, 2022 by MNORM

[JacquesBrel 639]

57 minutes ago, MNORM said:

No idea what you're referring to.  Is this a setting in NVidia Control Panel?

Yes. Very briefly explained it is an NVidia driver setting that allows your monitor to run at higher resolutions than its native resolution. Basically the graphics driver doing the render scaling instead of the game. If you Google "NVidia DSR" there are a lot of resources that explain it in more detail.

Edited August 2, 2022 by JacquesBrel

[AnkH 2,233]

9 hours ago, JacquesBrel said:

Very briefly explained it is an NVidia driver setting that allows your monitor to run at higher resolutions than its native resolution. 

This is technically wrong, a monitor can never run at higher resolutions than its native one. What you mean is that with DSR active, you are able to select resolutions higher than the native monitor resolution within the software (e.g. MSFS) and then the driver will downscale this to the native monitor resolution before outputting it. 

AMD has something similar called Virtual Super Resolution. 

With all those options the only thing that would need clarification is: does the MSFS internal algorithm or the driver algorithm result in a better image when downscaled. I do not know, I am currently using a render scale of 130 (on a 1440p monitor) simply to move the load primarly to my GPU instead of my CPU. The improved image quality is a nice plus, but not my main motivation. 

[JacquesBrel 639]

7 minutes ago, AnkH said:

This is technically wrong, a monitor can never run at higher resolutions than its native one

I know. It was merely meant as the very briefest explanation for someone with "No idea" what DSR does, to explain that just in practical terms, DSR allows you to select display resolutions your monitor cannot normally display.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

19 hours ago, MNORM said:

I've set the Render Scaling to 150 and the values (numbers) on the CRT screens have an odd shimmer/jaggy visual effect when there's movement of the camera.  But...the overall performance is better than at 200.   It sounds like I may just need to upgrade my monitor to 1440p to effectively eliminate this visual effect.

I am not 100% on this, but here is what I saw when I tested it with 4k monitor and 1440p on my own textures at my own airport I created, so was very familiar with how the native textures looked, and they are pretty high-res textures.

So the render scaling option doesn't appear to really be just rendering stuff in a higher resolution, but it is using some type of enhancement as well as a sharpening filter at a higher res and then downscaling back I guess. It is adding detail to textures, that's why it causes shimmering at high values, because there is too much detail increasing the pattern of the texture. It's like a detail enhancer.

If I just render things at 4k and downscale to 1440p, there was hardly any difference in the visuals (at least in my own textures), but if I use the render scaling, it's night and day difference (much more detail on textures close up, but at mid-longer distances questionable). So I tested its own internal renderer at different resolution vs. the render scaler, and it appears to be two different things.

I tested it side-by-side at 4k and 1440p with 2 different installs on 2 different monitors, as well as tested on same PC with screenshots. Both tests came to the same conclusion, the render scaler is a detail enhancer.

It does look better in some ways at some distances, but it can be overdone easily. 

 

Edited August 3, 2022 by Alpine Scenery

[jarmstro 2,402]

20 hours ago, David Mills said:

Yes, a dedicated computer monitor is of higher quality than a 4K TV (perhaps, maybe, supposedly). But a refresh rate higher than 60Hz (i.e., the refresh rate of a TV) isn't going to do you any good with MSFS, because few people exceed 60 fps in MSFS. Setting a 144 refresh rate on your monitor for a program outputting 30 fps is wasting resources. I personally use a 75-inch 4K Sony TV as my MSFS display. I sit only four feet from it. So the immersion is total and overwhelming. Even if I literally press my nose against the TV, the tiniest of screen text is flawless, even on a 75-inch display, because 4K has essentially equaled the resolution of human vision at that display size and distance. Your computer hardware is infinitely superior to mine, which is seven years old. There is no need for you to suffer the jaggy/shimmer you describe. SU10 beta does go a very long way in eliminating that unwanted effect, again depending on screen resolution and other things.

Hmmm..interesting. Not that I really understand. I have a spare Samsung 4K TV but currently use an Iiyama monitor running at 2560 x 1440 @ 70hz.  Both are the same physical size. Which of them would give me the best quality and performance?

[Maxis 1,857]

7 hours ago, AnkH said:

This is technically wrong, a monitor can never run at higher resolutions than its native one. What you mean is that with DSR active, you are able to select resolutions higher than the native monitor resolution within the software (e.g. MSFS) and then the driver will downscale this to the native monitor resolution before outputting it. 

AMD has something similar called Virtual Super Resolution. 

With all those options the only thing that would need clarification is: does the MSFS internal algorithm or the driver algorithm result in a better image when downscaled. I do not know, I am currently using a render scale of 130 (on a 1440p monitor) simply to move the load primarly to my GPU instead of my CPU. The improved image quality is a nice plus, but not my main motivation. 

I think a lot of these driver side upscalers have been missed by the general sim community when they were released.

Myself and a few others tried it out in April when it was released and it works pretty well. Comments and directions on how to implement it ( For AMD Cards ) can be found in this thread.

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/amd-super-resolution-version-22-3-1/505344/16

Edited August 3, 2022 by Maxis