Forums » Suggestions

Game Engine: Add "Full Scaling" to Mac, Windows, and Linux clients.

Dec 25, 2011 abortretryfail link
This might not seem a very big deal for most people, but it might be useful for some who have budget graphics chips and limited display resolution options (like HDTVs.) The easiest way to get a higher framerate is to lower your resolution, but what if your only options are 1024x768 and 1920x1080? 1024x768 looks awful stretched to fit a 42" TV.

The Android version has a scaling feature that lets the game render at a smaller-than-native resolution then scale up to fit the tablet's native res. Why not add this feature to the other platforms so we can select something like 1280x768 and scale it up to fit the larger display.

There's quite a few lower-end laptop GPUs on the market that run fine at native res flying around empty space, but then choke in some of the more populated sectors like border and hive skirmishes.

Anyways, kind of a niche feature, but i figured i'd throw the suggestion out there in case it's trivial to implement.
Dec 26, 2011 slime73 link
I'm not quite sure I understand. Is the suggestion to have the option to scale up with a fixed aspect ratio rather than stretching to fit the whole screen? If so, I believe that's a driver thing. It already does that on OSX in every game for me, and I remember seeing that in my driver config in Windows.
Dec 27, 2011 Pizzasgood link
I think the idea is that you could define a small pixelbuffer that has the same aspect ratio as your display, even if your driver/hardware doesn't actually support a small resolution with that aspect ratio. The game itself would then scale it up to the native resolution (or more specifically, whatever resolution the driver/display are currently running at).
Dec 28, 2011 incarnate link
That's possible. Although I would hope that most HDTVs make the 1280x720 option available too.

This is probably less trivial than just "enabling" the functionality on PC.. it's only implemented in OpenGL ES, and may need to be separately done for regular OpenGL and DirectX. I don't think it's super difficult either, but would probably consume some time to implement and test.

It'd sure be nice if we only had one graphics API to deal with.
Dec 28, 2011 abortretryfail link
Yeah I thought it was weird too, but I've seen some TVs that don't support 1280x720 at all and some wide screen computer monitor panels that only have 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and their native res. Talk about cutting corners...