Turn your 1080p monitor into 1440

[MonKENy]

can you guys please try to explain to him whats actually happening? Or am I wrong and its actually working?

https://youtu.be/Ez3qBwMSbBY

He wants to redo the video how can we help him explain to people whats happening in simple terms, and what would be the problems that might arise by doing this?


Mods please move this if its in the wrong section

 

[DigDog]

either his monitor is 1440 to start with, but firmware locked to 1080 (not impossible with a monitor from best buy), or he just set the gPU to output 1440, but it's still on a 1080 monitor.
no different than me setting 720 on my 1080.

 

[NTMBK]

seems legit

 

[Ajay]

Nothing on the desktop changes size. Not legit.

 

[EndlessWargasm]

This is just downsampling. Effectively the same as VSR, DSR, Ubersampling or even old school super sampling AA.

Good way increase image quality and get a bit of AA if you have the spare gpu grunt.

 

[MonKENy]

he forced his GPU to 1440, He thinks it makes a better picture and im sure in some applications it does look better but overall hes tricking himself I think. Im trying to get him to redo the video and change how he explains it. He is going to make people think they are getting true 1440 when its just down sampling the resolution.

Its also going to make people crank the GPU up and they will see slow down if I am understanding it correctly because the GPU is still trying to render in 1440 even if the monitor doesnt really care or display it.

 

[NTMBK]

Nothing on the desktop changes size. Not legit.

I was being sarcastic

 

[PrincessFrosty]

This is just downsampling. Effectively the same as VSR, DSR, Ubersampling or even old school super sampling AA.

Good way increase image quality and get a bit of AA if you have the spare gpu grunt.

No it's NOT, it really is not.

When down-sampling occurs the chip or software doing it has to make guesses at what colours the pixels should be, by either doing averages or by simply sampling odd number of pixels from the source to provide the final output, this severely degrades image quality of the final output - like all non-native resolutions have done since the dawn of time, it becomes a blurry and inaccurate mess.

1440p downsampled to 1080p will look worse than just regular native 1080p

If you want to actually increase the graphical fidelity you need real sources of data for your sub-pixel colour, that means doing Anti-Aliasing.

The only time that down-sampling doesn't ruin picture quality and can actually increase it, is when the fake resolution is an exact multiple of the native resolution, so that mathematically the pixels divide into each other accurately, so it would be possible to do this at 4k down to 1080p as 4k is exactly 4x the pixels. However that is exactly what Super Sampled Anti-Aliasing is doing, except that it's done internally on the card and is an optimised process which will run a bit better and give the same output.

either his monitor is 1440 to start with, but firmware locked to 1080 (not impossible with a monitor from best buy)

If it was firmware locked (which I've never even heard of anyway) it wouldn't matter, the video card is still detecting the resolution present on the display and downsampling the result, if there is such as thing as firmware locked monitors then you'd need to actually modify the firmware itself to present the panel to the video card as having a higher native resolution.

 

[puyo]

this is ridiculous.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Imagine for a second that we're down-sampling just a row of pixels for simplicity.

We have a native res of 10 which looks like this

[x][x][x][x][x][x][x][x][x][x]

Now we render internally at native res (10 px) which means each pixel of your render output maps exactly onto 1 pixel on your monitor in a 1:1 fashion, you get a perfect fit and it looks good.

Now assume we up the rendering resolution to 15 px and we try and fit this:

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]

into this

[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

How do we do this? Well we could only sample every Nth pixel from the render but that wont work because they're not exact multiples of each other, which means we'd need to pick odd spacing apart that would distort our final output, an attempt might look like this:

[1][3][4][6][8][10][11][12][13][15]

Notice that we jump odd number of pixels over 2 then 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2 - this is an obvious mess.

Or the other solution is to take weighted averages of each colour which result in inaccurate colours which might not even exist in the original scene, if the original scene for example is just black and white pixels alternating each pixel then what you'd get is a grey mess.

Down-sampling non-native resolutions, or up sampling for that matter, are both approximations unless the resolutions are exact multiples of each other.

 

[therealnickdanger]

This is no different than adding custom resolutions on any other display, except his display lets him go beyond 1080p. Not all LCDs will allow you to do this since even the manufacturers know that it makes for terrible picture quality. Any possible gains the user may perceive by bumping up to 1440 is lost on the panel's inability to properly display all the pixels. 1:1 is best.

He's better off using AA or DSR and letting the GPU resample everything.

 

[tweakboy]

Nice Sandy frosty... gb very nice OC.

 

[Innokentij]

The video is in 1080p nuff said.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

This is no different than adding custom resolutions on any other display, except his display lets him go beyond 1080p. Not all LCDs will allow you to do this since even the manufacturers know that it makes for terrible picture quality. Any possible gains the user may perceive by bumping up to 1440 is lost on the panel's inability to properly display all the pixels. 1:1 is best.

He's better off using AA or DSR and letting the GPU resample everything.

No, his display is still 1080p

In the nvidia control panel there are some options for scaling, by default it's set to gpu, if you create a custom resolution the (I presume hardware) scaler makes it 1080p. Has been usable on nvidia cards for years before they created and started marketing dsr. I used it in diablo 3 as that game didn't have antialiasing and it worked great, vastly improves image quality.

Amd vsr works the same way afaik, I think that's why it only works right on the newer models, which presumably have better scalers.

dsr is probably done with the driver/shaders, so they can add the optional blur thing (to hide scaling artifacts?)

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I made some test images for this today because I intend to test 4k scaling quality in windows, the test images are just 1px sized chequered patterns of pure black and white saved as pngs as 32bit with no compression, I have 2 test images 1080p.png and 2160p.png

I noticed when playing around with the test images that as you zoom in to higher zoom levels such that 1 pixel in the image is large, say spanning 3-4px on your monitor, you start to see the artefacts of scaling. I've taken a screenshot of my desktop (using prtscn key) and saved this to another .png you can see below.

This demonstrates the problem of scaling that isn't 4:1 or some other full multiple of the width*height, as you can clearly see this pattern comes out unevenly because the scaler has to try and divide whole numbers that aren't divisible by each other. You can open the source image and check the "pixel" sizes yourself, you'll find "pixels" which used to be ALL 1x1 that are blown up to be 5x3, 4x5, 4x4 and 5x5 in size, an obvious mess.

Scaling like this is never worth it, either up or down, done in software or on the GPU or even in hardware by the monitor itself. The only time you get perfect scaling is in exact multiples and 1080p doesn't go into 1440p.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Scaling like this is never worth it, either up or down, done in software or on the GPU or even in hardware by the monitor itself. The only time you get perfect scaling is in exact multiples and 1080p doesn't go into 1440p.

It doesn't work well for text, but it works great for 3d content.

Some games (arma 2 and 3, battlefield 4 and probably others) have it built in so the interface can stay at default res and doesn't suffer a quality penalty.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I've addressed this on the youtube channel, probably for the last time since people are just throwing out subjective statements like "well it just looks better" which isn't an argument for anything.

Objectively what is occurring is a mathematical reduction in accuracy of the final output with respect to the actual data present in the virtual world, AA improves IQ because it takes evenly spaced sub samples which increase the pool of sampled data across all pixels and averages that data to find the best fit of the pixel, down sampling guesses information between the pixels because subsamples aren't available to give accurate information, and ultimately results an uneven output which is a measurable, calculable, objective reduction in image quality.

This is the same ignorance that comes out of the crowd that support post processing AA methods that are just a blur filter, you can do that for free just wear a pair of glasses that adjust your focal distance and blur the screen for you and revel in reduced image quality to the extent that it masks things like aliasing.

Reducing the image quality of the entire scene in order to mask aliasing artefacts is NOT an increase in image quality, this should be common sense.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

No, this is mathematically closer to the virtual world. It is nothing like post aa, and more like real aa. It does not take the closest pixel, each pixel is a weighted average.

 

[bystander36]

I've addressed this on the youtube channel, probably for the last time since people are just throwing out subjective statements like "well it just looks better" which isn't an argument for anything.

Objectively what is occurring is a mathematical reduction in accuracy of the final output with respect to the actual data present in the virtual world, AA improves IQ because it takes evenly spaced sub samples which increase the pool of sampled data across all pixels and averages that data to find the best fit of the pixel, down sampling guesses information between the pixels because subsamples aren't available to give accurate information, and ultimately results an uneven output which is a measurable, calculable, objective reduction in image quality.

This is the same ignorance that comes out of the crowd that support post processing AA methods that are just a blur filter, you can do that for free just wear a pair of glasses that adjust your focal distance and blur the screen for you and revel in reduced image quality to the extent that it masks things like aliasing.

Reducing the image quality of the entire scene in order to mask aliasing artefacts is NOT an increase in image quality, this should be common sense.

Down sampling is nearly identical to Ordered Grid Super Sampling. And yes, OGSSAA can make things blurry, especially text, so it is terrible at the desktop. So is just about every other AA, but in games, with organic content, OGSSAA is good, so are other AA methods. And you know what, all these AA methods do make things look blurry if you look close, but a little blur is better than jagged edges.

 

[bystander36]

And if you want to see examples of what it does, with it more fully explained, read this:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2252699&highlight=

 

[PrincessFrosty]

No, this is mathematically closer to the virtual world. It is nothing like post aa, and more like real aa. It does not take the closest pixel, each pixel is a weighted average.

Yes and a weighted average across an uneven space gives bad info. If you have an example image of ordered rows of texels alternating colour, say black and white at fixed distances what you get in the output won't be that you'll turn an evenly spaced and regular pattern into an irregular one which regular AA taken at fixed points will not do.

All the artefacts from doing this sort of graphical work have been clearly documented from bench marking AA and AF quality over the years. We've been using AA and AF reference images things like AA for decades, that's why we have things like rotated grid anti aliasing to help improve the accuracy at specific angles for example. Where you take sub samples, their number and spacing as well as position and their regularity in the image actually matter, they always have and always will.

As I said if you want AA then just force it in the control panel or with external tools and if you merely want blur then just use post FX AA.

*edit*

And yes that link confirms exactly what I've been saying, that doing it at 2x your res (4x the pixels) is basically just SSAA, which is NOT what the video linked is doing becuase 1080p doesn't go into 1440p (math fail). There's a reason that traditionally SSAA didn't come with smaller scaling options like a 1.5x or a 1.25x resolution increase, use your head for 5 seconds to work out why that might be.

 

[bystander36]

As I said if you want AA then just force it in the control panel or with external tools and if you merely want blur then just use post FX AA.

The problem is there are games which you can't force it. That is where down sampling is quite good. It is also lighter than traditional SSAA and better than FXAA.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Yes and a weighted average across an uneven space gives bad info. If you have an example image of ordered rows of texels alternating colour, say black and white at fixed distances what you get in the output won't be that you'll turn an evenly spaced and regular pattern into an irregular one which regular AA taken at fixed points will not do.

All the artefacts from doing this sort of graphical work have been clearly documented from bench marking AA and AF quality over the years. We've been using AA and AF reference images things like AA for decades, that's why we have things like rotated grid anti aliasing to help improve the accuracy at specific angles for example. Where you take sub samples, their number and spacing as well as position and their regularity in the image actually matter, they always have and always will.

As I said if you want AA then just force it in the control panel or with external tools and if you merely want blur then just use post FX AA.

*edit*

And yes that link confirms exactly what I've been saying, that doing it at 2x your res (4x the pixels) is basically just SSAA, which is NOT what the video linked is doing becuase 1080p doesn't go into 1440p (math fail). There's a reason that traditionally SSAA didn't come with smaller scaling options like a 1.5x or a 1.25x resolution increase, use your head for 5 seconds to work out why that might be.

Weighted means it takes the distances into account, it doesn't distort patterns. We know 4:1 downsampling is nicer, but heavier, and some cards cant do it.

I use regular aa whenever I can, but sometimes you can't. This method isn't perfect, and not as efficient as aa, but it is much better than nothing. And it's not "merely blur", in fact I'd say it doesn't blur at all.

As for post "aa", you can use this and post. Supposedly with good results.

 

[bystander36]

I might add, that one downside to down sampling is it does introduce some latency, depending on how fast your monitors scaler works, it can be rather uncomfortable.

 

[MattL]

lol...

lol