Lossless Scaling. FGx2-x20 & upscaling on ANY GPU! Miniguide page 11

[Cyan]

Resident Evil 3 Remake finished playing it at the max refresh rate. At times I got it to 71x5 (FG) although most of the game was played at 59x6 (FG). Very short game but it's not bad at all, sometimes I appreciate short games like this.

Age of Mythology tested, I finished all the campaigns a while ago and just installed it again to test the Benchmark option, which makes things hectic.

No artifacts during testing. But in battles with very fine detail like thousands of arrows, there could be artifacts? I mention this 'cos @Cappuccino commented there are artifacts in certain massive strategy games.

The RTS game I have that might show artifacts is Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, maybe? Haven't tried.

Running AoM at high fps doesn't benefit the game at all, I don't notice a difference. So I turned FG off.

 

[Cyan]

played Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, at 119x3 FG and 71x5 FG respectively. Smooth and fun. Doom Eternal started to run uncapped at 250-290fps but once the action started it was a different story, hence the 71x5, while Doom 2016 performs better and works well with a solid 120fps base on my rig.

Thinking about completing Doom once again (I finished the game like 8 years ago on a i7-7700HQ and 1050Ti 4GB laptop at 60fps -not stable but an ok experience).

edit: won't report the test of any game for a while, if ever. The app is working fine, and unless I find a game that works either so bad full of glitches of surprisingly good 'cos it performs much better than I expected to use FG, I don't seem myself reporting it any random game again.

This is a really good app, not perfect, but the fact that I can play practically all my games at the full refresh rate of my best gaming monitor with decent quality is something I am very grateful for, I didn't have to spend 2000$ on a GPU to achieve that.

 

[Cyan]

one of the best uses of FG, handhelds and the like.

 

[see colon]

Thinking about completing Doom once again (I finished the game like 8 years ago on a i7-7700HQ and 1050Ti 4GB laptop at 60fps -not stable but an ok experience).

Do you still have that laptop and how doe LS scaling work on that? I used to have an HP Omen with that configuration, but one day, it just stopped turning on.

 

[Cyan]

Do you still have that laptop and how doe LS scaling work on that? I used to have an HP Omen with that configuration, but one day, it just stopped turning on.

alas, I don't. The battery stopped working properly and I stopped using it years ago. I've seen videos of LS running on GTX 1050Ti -one of them as of recently- and it wasn't spectacular but it worked.

This is on a regular GTX 1050 (lapton, no Ti).

 

[Cyan]

odd game found, Clive Barker's Undying. Quite an old game but still good. Glide to DirectX wrapper behaves oddly, framerate is all over the place -it can go from 40 fps t0 23 fps to 60fps- and artifacts are abundant.

It works better when using the Glide to Vulkan option, 60fps are stable, game won't run at more than that, and LS runs the game at close to 360fps with x6 FG but never quite. While 60fps base are stable, it never reaches 60/360 but 60/356 at most, but normally the game runs at 60/320 something.

 

[Davros]

Clive Barker's Undying is an awesome game you should try and finish it

 

[Cyan]

Clive Barker's Undying is an awesome game you should try and finish it

I'm playing it, using Vulkan, locked to 59fps - it doesn't allow more than 60 - and with FG x 6 (354fps). Fixed the issue using the native Vulkan support via the voodoo2dg program provided by GoG.

The game is cool, and it looks very clean with the legendary MSAA enabled. There are no fine details, all the textures are like a block, typical in old games and MSAA does true WONDERS there.

Those were the times... So clean!!

The game is very scary, and it also has a super oppressive atmosphere. Also, I don't know why, I imagine living in a house like that all my life and you must surely die of cold, it's huge.

It doesn't surprise me that Jeremiah is sick.

I got to the top of the house and a man came out and said, "I'll show you magic." Then I fell into a room where one of the maids had been killed and had a key.

 

[Cyan]

Halo Infinite shows a very similar behaviour compared to The Witcher 3. Can get it to run at a stable 60fps x6, 45x8fps, 40x9fps, 51x7fps, but while the base framerate remains super stable, the FG never reaches its full potential of 360fps, Not the biggest deal, but it doesn't feel as smooth as 90%+ of my games.

Maybe the bottleneck is my GPU in this case? Or is it my CPU? Increasing max latency didn't help at all. On a more powerful PC I guess I'd achieve 360 stable fps, perhaps. I just super sample it to near 130%.

Halo Infinite has a lot of very cool framerate limit options (based on your refresh rate: 40 fps, 45, 52, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360, just like Forza 5.

 

[Cyan]

dunno about Halo Infinite, but The Witcher 3 is a known case for being relatively slow 'cos they used a translation layer to transform DX11 api calls into DX12 when they added RT, XeSS support etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/zmik1x/this_is_why_dx12_witcher_3_performs_worse_on_pc

DirectX 11 works... but it doesn't work very well on Intel GPUs. In fact just the other day I tested Alien Isolation with the default DX11 support and the game sometimes randomly dropped to 40fps for no apparent reason.

I used the DXVK Manager from @worldofjoysticks and under Vulkan I can play the game at a stable 71fps x 5.

 

[Cyan]

been watching a youtube video with this tech. And something that comes to mind is that bandwidth is pretty expensive, so youtube can't offer 120fps or 240fps videos, but they could use this technology to save bandwidth and offer proper 120fps/240fps videos after processing an original 120fps+ video,

 

[Cyan]

just in case it really helps anyone... As of late I noticed that games I completed always playing at the max refresh rate of the monitor, didn't run at 59/354fps or 71/355 etc.

Those same games -Resident Evil 2 Remake- started to fluctuate running at 59/290-310-320-330fps.

And I found the culprit. I had enabled V-Sync!

I disabled Vsync and now those games run buttery smooth. Including Halo Infinite which felt "off" before. -uneven, not smooth, smoother than native base fps by a long shot, but totally odd-.

Previously, I had enabled Smart Vsync, which was the key for those games to run like a charm. According to Intel's webpage;

Smart VSync: Automatically enables VSync when the application’s render rate exceeds the display's refresh rate and disables VSync when the render rate falls below the display's refresh rate.

Since I always limit the games to a number where they never get to 360Hz but the immediately closest number before that -depending on the multiplicand and multiplier- i.e. with FGx6 I use 59/354 instead of 60/360, Vsync never engages and the framerate stays within the VRR range.

The difference in Halo Infinite is staggering, night and day.

 

[Cyan]

not using Vsync On but Smart Vsync fixed the framerate in The Witcher 3. Now I can play the game at the max refresh rate of the monitor all the time! Here the base game is locked at 51fps x 7 (FG)

Now the game feels floaty smooth like the mouse in the OS desktop and like all the other games I played til now using FG.

If someone told me a couple of years ago that I could play TW3 at 360fps on a PC from 2019 -added A770 in 2022-, I'd call that person nuts.

 

[Cyan]

on input lag. I'm not to be totally trusted since I usually play SP games and also I'm not that sensitive to input lag.

But, out of the dozens of games I tried, the ONLY game where I noticed something was truly off, when I felt the game was unplayable 'cos of input lag was when I locked Sonic CD, an old game meant to run on CRT monitors, locked to 60fps and added FGx6.

Without FG the game plays just fine, like on an old TV, but once I enabled FG, when switching directions in the gamepad didn't immediately translate to the TV, causing the game to be really harder to play.

On a different note, managed to get The Witcher 3 running at a stable 59fps and FGx6.

In addition the motion clarity helped me in a tough close quarters boss fight against elite Chak Lok in Halo Infinite. It's easier to see and pinpoint the baddies that way.

Plus that elite disappears and just appears during a fraction of a second.

The previous boss to that, I remember taking like 10 tries to beat him 3 years ago. I got it the second time now --dunno if this is 'cos of the improved framerate, but maybe it helps.

I never played past Chak Lok before, and I beat him in my first try, so not bad. Maybe I'm going to complete Halo Infinite once and for all.

 

[Cyan]

so, I'm running ALL my games at 360fps. After dozens of games tested, several successes and failures, this is what worked for me.

Mini Lossless Scaling guide​

- Test the game without FG to know the base performance of your CPU/GPU to begin with. LS is going to remove some fps from the equation when it engages, so it helps you calculate the ideal locked base fps.

- Use Rivatuner to limit the base framerate to 89, 119, 44, 51, 71, 29, 35, 59, 89, 179fps, etc.

Note that I am using multiples (90, 120, 30, 45, 180, 60, etc) minus 1 of 360Hz.

I subtract 1 so Vsync very rarely engages, if ever. We don't Vsync to ever engage, just keep the framerate within the VRR range of the monitor -in the example 48Hz to 360Hz-.

So 59x6FG = 354fps, 71x5FG = 357fps, etc etc, it never reaches 360Hz or more.

- Enable Smart Vsync or similar on your GPU panel (enabling Vsync On in the GPU panel didn't work for me, it was disastrous). Description of Smart Vsync (in the Intel GPU control panel).

Smart VSync: Automatically enables VSync when the application’s render rate exceeds the display's refresh rate and disables VSync when the render rate falls below the display's refresh rate.

- Disable Vsync in game!

- Once you find your ideal base framerate use a FG multiplier that gets you the closest to your display's max refresh rate.

That's it.

Picture of my current LS settings.

Spoiler: a different option for anyone who uses Vsync On in the GPU control panel

As per Blur Busters G-Sync/Freesync recommendations' article (the bible of smoothness):

-> Global framerate limiter on the GPU's panel set to 3fps less than your monitor's max refresh rate (i.e. 162fps for a 165fps monitor)
-> VRR on
-> Vsync on (in the GPU's native control panel, but set Vsync to off in-game)
-> Framerate limiter like Rivatuner with nVidia Reflex enabled, set to a multiple of your monitor's limited max refresh rate for a very precise, low input lag framepacing (i.e. 54fps framerate limiter on Rivatuner for a 162fps max framerate on a 165Hz display)

This is the article of Blur Busters on how to use Freesync/Gsync:

G-SYNC 101 - Blur Busters - Page 14

G-SYNC Module The G-SYNC module is a small chip that replaces the display's standard internal scaler, and contains enough onboard memory to hold and process a single frame at a time. The module exploits the vertical blanking interval (the span between the previous and next frame scan) to...

blurbusters.com

Vsync On didn't work for me. If I didn't enable Smart Vsync, when I had Vsync On the problem was that The Witcher 3, Halo Infinite and so on and so forth, instead of running at 59/354fps or 51/357fps, 71/355fps they ran at a fluctuating 59/280-300-290-320fps, 71/270-300-320-280fps, 51/290-300-280-330-310fps etc, and the games didn't feel smooth, something was really off.

Disabling Vsync and enabling Smart Vsync fixed all of that.