Why dont more games do this?

[futurefields]

option to leave HUD/menus in native resolution when rendering gameplay at a lower resolution.

makes a huge difference!

 

[lavaheadache]

Good idea

 

[Blue_Max]

Res is res. It changes the whole output on the screen.

What you're proposing is still keeping your res the same, but lowering quality levels of everything else significantly.

 

[Dankk]

I don't even understand how that would work. When you're in fullscreen and you change the resolution of a game, your video card basically has to switch over to an entirely different output mode. How would it manage to output two different resolutions at once? Are you just pulling this out of your head, or is there an actual game that does this?

And besides, running fullscreen games at anything other than native resolution on an LCD monitor makes it look like absolute garbage. I'd rather turn down a few details here and there than make the entire image look like mud.

 

[BrightCandle]

Presumably what this would be is the video card is at monitor native resolution but the game is rendered to a buffer that is lower resolution and then its processed to put it on screen at native resolution and the HUD is then added.

One reason why developers might not do this is that the post processing to upscale the render is now a shader program running on the GPU, which is basically costing them even more performance. So unless they have access to the scaling like they do on xbox/ps its going to make the game slower to do it this way.

 

[SunnyD]

option to leave HUD/menus in native resolution when rendering gameplay at a lower resolution.

makes a huge difference!

Because it requires additional graphics resources which will slow down the rendering, possibly significantly.

In fact, it entirely defeats the purpose of rendering the gameplay at a lower resolution. The game will quite literally be rendering the scene twice, possibly even three or more times if AA is involved.

 

[zebrax2]

Something like this?

 

[ImpulsE69]

I think what he is really asking for is a scalable hud.

 

[CakeMonster]

I've been wondering something very similar.

I don't want windows to resize my whole desktop and screw up every open window when I play a game at a lower resolution. I wish EVERY game would run in "Windowed Borderless", meaning it fills the screen but not switches video mode, and additionally I want it to stretch like a video that is run in "fullscreen". HUD in full res is preferable but not critical.

If this had been available for all games I'd already have a 4K monitor.

 

[Blue_Max]

I've been wondering something very similar.

I don't want windows to resize my whole desktop and screw up every open window when I play a game at a lower resolution. I wish EVERY game would run in "Windowed Borderless", meaning it fills the screen but not switches video mode, and additionally I want it to stretch like a video that is run in "fullscreen". HUD in full res is preferable but not critical.

If this had been available for all games I'd already have a 4K monitor.

That still doesn't change the fact you can't run two different resolutions on top of each other.
The only way to do what he wants is to keep the res the same, but somehow run the graphics engine with less detail, fewer triangles, etc.

Of course, a game developer could simply anti-alias the HUD as much as possible so the game still looks good at 640x480... they did back when that was considered HIGH res!