[Suggestion] Extra scaling options/Res control!

Hello.

I notice that C2 builds start chugging as desktop resolutions go up, especially if you throw a couple of shader effects in. I have no clue how C2 actually handles scaling, but if I was to guess I'd say separate scaling operations are done on each object in view. Is that correct? Also, seeing as the gpu takes such a massive hit from rendering an upscaled view with shaders I guess shader effects get applied after scaling is done too.

If I'm right, wouldn't it be faster to render everything at 1x1 or 2x2 onto a buffer of some kind, then just upscale the buffer to the target resolution in a single scaling operation instead?

Lots of people have desktop resolutions at 1600x1200 or higher and they will not be impressed if my humble 2D games get outperformed by something like Skyrim on their systems :P

Just a thought. I may be completely wrong about how scaling is done. But still, if C2 builds have to run at desktop resolutions I think some kind of optimization is needed here.

Check that tutorial about supporting multiple screen sizes.

Does it help ?

Thanks, but nope. I'm already making use of the scaling options in project settings.

The thing is that while you can set your game resolution to scale up to fill the screen, the screen will always be set to the target device's native resolution. On PC's and Mac's, if the desktop resolution is 1900x1200 then a game resolution of 400x300 gets scaled four times with letterbox scale. That's fine, except 4x4 scale seems to suck up a *lot* more gpu power than 1x1 or 2x2 scale for some reason, even with webgl enabled.

I've tested on a Geforce GT 540M and a Geforce 9500, and performance drops to something like 10-20 fps on both of em if the desktop resolution goes beyond the 1280x960 range. These aren't the beefiest gpu's around, but they're not feeble either. If they can render a game resolution of 400x300 fine at 1024x768 desktop resolution, then they should be able to do the same at 1600x1200, no?

I guess it depends mostly on if your graphic card drivers are up to date.

I haven't experienced drops when playing fullscreen C2 games.

Not sure about that. Lots of people have complained about performance issues in fullscreen and I myself have gone above and beyond to optimize my games to no avail (in fullscreen).

Thing is, it doesn't seem to be the usual slowdown. Instead the animations slow down / become erratic, things start screwing up, and then if you add more objects or whatever the game starts slowing down. I never noticed it until I tried fullscreen in my projects with higher quality art / lots of animation frames.

Kyatric:

My drivers are as up-to-date as can be, unless Nvidia pushed out a new driver package the last week.

Tokinsom:

Yep, that jittery, herky-jerky updating kicks in for me as well when things begin to slow.