Do PC games upscale?

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WabeWalker

Supreme [H]ardness
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I believe that the default setting for ARMA 2 is an image that's upscaled, and that you can disable this in the options menu? So the question: Do other titles play this trick as well, but not provide an option to view the game as a non-upscaled image?

The reason I ask: I just bought a monitor that displays natively at 2560x1440, and although some titles look amazingly sharp, others just look downright fuzzy.

Last night I bought The Force Unleashed 2, and I'm convinced that the image is being upscaled. There's just no way that what I'm seeing in The Force Unleashed 2 is a native 2560x1440 image.

Any thoughts?
 
Some titles upscale a lower resolution image, but very few actually. Other games use SSAA (screen space anti aliasing) which is like a shader-based AA, very ugly but used because it's not too demanding. It's another one that's not very common though. I think Mafia 2 uses something like this, as did GTA 4 (optionally disabled). Aside from those two things you might be running a resolution that is not your monitor's native res, which always gives the image that slightly fuzzy look.
 
WabeWalker said:
Is that what it is? Jesus.
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Well you certainly can't compare it to something like Arma 2.

If you have a console, try playing it on your monitor to see what *true* upscaling really looks like. It's pretty terrible. I have my xbox360 connected to my 1920x1080 monitor and the games just can't compare to PC games running at full 1080p as opposed to being upscaled. I always have to push away from my desk to play a 360 game.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
Some titles upscale a lower resolution image, but very few actually. Other games use SSAA (screen space anti aliasing) which is like a shader-based AA, very ugly but used because it's not too demanding. It's another one that's not very common though. I think Mafia 2 uses something like this, as did GTA 4 (optionally disabled). Aside from those two things you might be running a resolution that is not your monitor's native res, which always gives the image that slightly fuzzy look.
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I noticed in Bioshock that when I notched the resolution up to 2560x1440, from 1920x1080, which was the native resolution of my old monitor, that nothing actually happened. In the menu it said I was displaying natively at 2560x1440 but it looked exactly as before.

In my mind, Bioshock looked a lot better on my previous monitor. Is there any way that certain titles, on this new monitor of mine, are upscaling somehow?

When I run other titles, such as Resident Evil 5, at 2560x1440, I'm blown away (just wickedly sharp, with amazing color depth) - but other titles just look fuzzy, and the colors seem kind of bland.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Well you certainly can't compare it to something like Arma 2.

If you have a console, try playing it on your monitor to see what *true* upscaling really looks like. It's pretty terrible. I have my xbox360 connected to my 1920x1080 monitor and the games just can't compare to PC games running at full 1080p as opposed to being upscaled. I always have to push away from my desk to play a 360 game.
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Yes, I connected my 360 to this monitor, and the upscaling is truly god awful.

That said, when I set the scaling on my monitor to 1:1 imaging, the displayed image shrunk to a quarter of the size of the screen, but the image looked sensational. For the first time ever, Red Dead Redemption actually impressed me. Too bad the image was too small. I would lose my eyesight playing with a screen size that small. It almost looked like a PC image though.
 
Games don't usually scale internally, they throw the configured resolution at the drivers and the video card drivers deal with scaling it to the monitor depending on your preferences.

Upscaling usually looks terrible so always run your games in native resolution, if you are and things look bad it's often to do with low quality art assets, when you run higher resolutions the low quality art really starts to become apparant. It's quite common with games ported from consoles or which have gone through multi-platform development and suffer from lowest common denominator development.
 
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PrincessFrosty said:
Games don't usually scale internally, they throw the configured resolution at the drivers and the video card drivers deal with scaling it to the monitor depending on your preferences.

Upscaling usually looks terrible so always run your games in native resolution, if you are and things look bad it's often to do with low quality art assets, when you run higher resolutions the low quality art really starts to become apparant. It's quite common with games ported from consoles or which have gone through multi-platform development and suffer from lowest common denominator development.
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I guess that's what it is then. The higher resolution on this new, sharper monitor is exposing low textures.
 
yeah you'll get that a lot, textures look really pretty bad at 2560x1600 unless the source art is really high quality and there simply isn't the texture budget on consoles and the limited hardware they have, it why we have so many texture pack mods release for games to try and fix that.
 
It is just an issue due to how most 2D assets (based on how they are currently designed and implemented) need to be developed for a certain resolution, since there is no real way to upscale them similar to 3D geometry. Just take say a 400x400 image and upscale it to 800x800 using whatever method (maybe something fancy like Lanczos resampling) you want, and there lies the issue.
 
Well 2D art assets in a texture format like DDS tend to store multiple resolutions of the same texture within the texture file itself, usually the native size of the texture and then variants of it which progressively get smaller in 1/4 size steps. I don't think there much if any actual dynamic scaling in game of the textures the game just loads in whatever textures in needs once you start the map, based on the settings you've selected

There's no point in trying to up scale 2D art because up scaling doesn't actually add any useful information, you can't just generate useful texture information from thin air.
 
We will see how idTech 5 pans out, soon. Hopefully this will spark an interest in texture asset creation with such a low overhead.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Well 2D art assets in a texture format like DDS tend to store multiple resolutions of the same texture within the texture file itself, usually the native size of the texture and then variants of it which progressively get smaller in 1/4 size steps. I don't think there much if any actual dynamic scaling in game of the textures the game just loads in whatever textures in needs once you start the map, based on the settings you've selected

There's no point in trying to up scale 2D art because up scaling doesn't actually add any useful information, you can't just generate useful texture information from thin air.
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Actually mipmapping is also used to dynamically downscale in games depending on the distance of the object. But of course this does only go one way, since while down scaling is relatively easy with current techniques, there is no real way to properly upscale an image of course (regardless of the format).
 
The Force Unleashed 2 is just scaled to the larger resolution. The company that ported it did nothing to enhance the game for PC users or do anything to take advantage of the platform at all. The game supports no AA, no AF options, and basically is what it is. You can adjust the resolution all you want but the fact is that the game's textures are the same ones found in the XBOX 360 version. As a result it is absolutely terrible on the PC. The performance I saw out of it was laughable at best. Some of the in game cut scenes stuttered really badly. (In game, not the FMV.)[/] I saw this on a demo machine at Fry's. The machine was a Core i7 980X with a GTX 480 and 24GB of RAM. It still ran badly. No thanks.

This is largely why I got it on XBOX 360 instead of the PC.
 
The Force Unleashed 2 just looks god awful.

My friends, I believe that I was a victim of this game's marketing campaign (oh my god, did I actually fall for the marketing... well, shoot, I guess I did), because the screenshots, at Steam, are gorgeous.

Seriously, these screenshots look nothing like what I'm seeing on my PC. These are crisp and clear, and promise of a modern game engine.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/32500/?snr=1_4_4__13

In my defense, this was an impulse buy for me. I had a Future Shop gift card, and since I was standing in the store, and there was only one copy left, I bit... or rather, I bought. I guess I should have read the corresponding thread at this forum first.

That said, I haven't played this yet, and I probably shouldn't be commenting on the game itself... but the graphics do suck.
 
Horrible doesn't begin to describe Force Unleashed 2. Not only is it the worst game I played last year its one of the worst games I've played in a long time.
 
Colonel Sanders said:
Some titles upscale a lower resolution image, but very few actually. Other games use SSAA (screen space anti aliasing) which is like a shader-based AA, very ugly but used because it's not too demanding.
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SSAA is super-sampling anti-aliasing, which is when the video card renders frames at a higher resolution and then scales them down to reduce aliasing. It is significantly more demanding than multi-sampling anti-aliasing. Shader-based anti-aliasing is something different entirely.
 
Zero82z said:
SSAA is super-sampling anti-aliasing, which is when the video card renders frames at a higher resolution and then scales them down to reduce aliasing. It is significantly more demanding than multi-sampling anti-aliasing. Shader-based anti-aliasing is something different entirely.
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The acronym applies to both screen-space AA and supersampling.
 
My thoughts on the Force Unleashed 2

Graphics

The bad PC port not withstanding, on an HDTV and your XBOX 360 the game looks fantastic. It's easily one of the best 3rd person type action games I've ever seen in this category. Lighting is superb and the weather effects are unmatched. Also there is quite a bit of environmental destructibility and all cloth makes heavy use of Havoc physics. In fact from a physics standpoint the game is remarkable. In fact this is probably the best implementation of physics I've ever seen in a game. While Arkham Asylum was certainly prettier with them, they didn't change the core game play. Here I think the physics do to some degree. It makes things breakable that wouldn't ordinarily be and you can of course use the force to slam these objects into enemies. It also allows pretty much all windows to be breakable and to even compact AT-ST's and Tie Fighters into tiny balls of trash to be hurled where you want.

Voice Acting

Voice acting is not on par with the original. Yoda is probably the best voiced of all the characters and his appearance is very short in the game.

Cut Scenes

The quality of the cinematic sequences in the game are second to none. They are the best I have ever seen in terms of detail, and overall quality. They simply look great.

Story -Warning Spoilers

Ultimately the story for the game is a continuation of the first game's story. It's a "resurrection" story if you will about Starkiller. The game proposes contradictions in order to confuse this new Starkiller and make him think he is not a clone, and that he is. However databank entries and unlockable cinematic sequences (from the challenge mode) actually dispute this making you almost 100% certain that Starkiller is a clone. The Dark Side ending which is admittedly likely the non-canon ending also confirms this hypothesis. Additionally before the confrontation with Vader, Starkiller is essentially losing it showing that he's ultimately facing the same threat as the other clones. Though in the light side ending he stabilizes for the most part. All in all the game leaves this open which means that the very simple quest for Starkiller's identity is ultimately un-fulfilling.

What's interesting about the story actually comes from small items in the databank and some of the unlockable cinematic sequences. These actually tell you more about the early days of the Rebellion leading up to the final days of the Empire. Far more than the actual story does. For example we find out the fate of the Nemodian people who used to control the Trade Federation and the droid army. We find out a little about the switch from highly trained and effective clone troopers to the god aweful and inept Storm troopers. So there is some added value, but only for the most hardcore of Star Wars fans.

Audio / Music

This is one area that's pretty much a given. The game uses scores from the films and some new material as well. Ultimately the music gives the game the ambiance it needs for a given section or sequence. Though with the vast library of Star Wars films and games this seems like a really easy thing for any Star Wars game to achieve and even the worst Star Wars game of all time managed to nail this. (Star Wars Galaxies)

Gameplay

As others have said the game play is really improved over the previous game. Force powers are easier to use and flow better with the game this time around. The enemies aren't as widely varied in the first game, but given that you are taking on Imperial controlled worlds primarily, this makes some sense. The game is more challenging than the first until you max out your force powers. At that point you can pretty much handle every situation but you have to be careful. Sometimes the amount of enemies thrown at you are difficult to handle. Not only because of how many their are but because they are a specific type. Some enemies can only be beaten a certain way which mixes things up a bit and forces you to think more at first. After awhile it gets tedious and the challenge is gone. Also they have a force fury meter now. You tend to hold this in reserve a lot of the time because it doesn't last long, makes you way more powerful and almost feels like a cheat. You tend to hold this in reserve but if you don't you'll find vary quickly that all Starkiller's moves are different while amped up in this form. There is also no need to hold it for boss fights as they all can be done without it.

The dismemberment is a nice touch and I think it adds to the feel of the lightsaber combat. The combinations are easier to execute in this game which also allows you to change things up. You can impale force griped enemies with your thrown lightsabers, or infuse them with lightning so that when thrown, they kill enemies they make contact with. Zapping jump troopers with force lightning and watching them fly around and crash is also fantastic and that one never got old with me. The grappling was added in and worked well but needed some more variations on it.

The boss fights are at least interesting and unique. The Gorag sequence is especially cool though it's long and drawn out at the higher difficulty settings. The boss fights felt as though they were better integrated into the game than what I've seen in most other games. The boss fights even manage to avoid that overly repetitive feeling the levels had.

Overall the core game play of the Force Unleashed 2 is excellent and in fact largely improved over the first game. It's really what salvages (to some degree) an otherwise bad game.

Level Design

Level design sucks. The levels are pretty but they are overly repetitive and parts of them are obvious cut and pastes of other sections. This makes the game ultimately feel like a rush job. Earlier parts of each level are well thought out and show a lot of variance then all of the sudden it's same old same old again. Literally you'll go through the same sections two or three times with slight variations in color, lighting, or fog with some slightly different enemies to make the game longer. It's blatantly obvious. It's probably the biggest flaw in the whole experience.

Lightsabers & Costumes

Actually changing your lightsaber crystals has different effects similar to what we saw in the KOTOR games. So instead of altering them for purely cosmetic reasons as we did in the first one, there is value in finding lightsaber crystals here. Once you find a combination that works for you, the effort pays off in the game play. Either it gives you enough of the health regeneration you need to get past certain parts, or it gives your force powers enough extra juice to take on more difficult hordes of enemies. The costumes offered are purely cosmetic. If you have a save game on your HDD from the first game three costumes from that game get imported into this one. Most of the costumes are unlockables, but many of them are extremely cool looking. So this theme is carried over from the first game.

DLC

Love the DLC model or hate it, it's here to stay. At least on the console side. I'm enough of a Star Wars fan that I went ahead and picked up the costume pack and the Endor campaign. For those who are not familiar with the DLC in these games, it all falls under the "Star Wars Infinities" brand. These are alternate universe type scenarios in which major events in the Star Wars story are changed and their consequences explored. In the DLC for this game, the one perfect clone of Starkiller is sent to hunt down and kill Leia Skywalker and eliminate her. A secondary objective is to prevent the Rebels from destroying the shield generator.

This campaign adds value to the original game as it allows you to go around and zap Ewoks with force lightning, hack them up with your lightsavers, force throw them into things and oh yes, force "punt" them. Before entering the shield generator you have a show down with Chewbacca and Han Solo. Han stands on top of the entrance to the shield generator with a rocket launcher while Chewy handles the AT-ST walker. Yes, you kill them in a fashion that I'd only term as pure awesomeness. Then you move on to fight Leia. She can be quite challenging as well. Ultimately you defeat her and the Emperor betrays you and Darth Vader. It ends with Starkiller meditating on his victory and a small fleet of Imperial forces coming to terminate him.

The DLC also features new unlockable costumes and upon completion you get the "Jedi Hunter" costume worn by the her....villain of the campaign. The other DLC is a costume pack which is cool, but "meh" as far as price goes. The Endor campaign on the other hand is awesome and while not terribly long, it was excellent for a DLC type level. By itself it takes roughly an hour to play and complete. I enjoyed this part simply because the Ewoks ruined Return of the Jedi. In my opinion it would probably be the best of the three or at least a very close second to The Empire Strikes back if they had been left the story with Wookies and not shrunk them down into more kid friendly and comical "Ewoks." So you can finaly have your revenge on those little bastards and fry them, dismember them, or simply punt them around.

Was it Fun?

Ultimately the game is quite a bit of fun. Was it $59.99 fun? For me yes. For most people, I'd say no. It is only my inner Star Wars nerd which valued this game as a must have at full price. For everyone else though, at $20 or $30 I think it's worth at least a single play through from either hard core Star Wars fans or fans of the original game.
 
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