How To Fix Scaling Issues With Overclocking

Ever await at your screen and wish yous could simply creepo a piddling bit more resolution out of it than information technology's physically capable of? Sounds like a pipedream, merely the reality is that you can crank more resolution out of it using a special something called downsampling (or, in less friendly terms, OGSSAA – Ordered Filigree Super Sampling Antialiasing. Try saying that over and over once more). While it doesn't physically cram more pixels into your display, it can provide a big boost to your gaming performance.

Here we'll evidence you what downsampling means and how to do it using both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.

Note: this feature is by and large useful for gaming rather than increasing your desktop resolution, so don't expect to turn your desktop into a fully functioning 4k display!

What Is Downsampling?

The magical process of downsampling makes your estimator think that your monitor is capable of handling higher resolutions, so when you switch information technology on, you'll see in your games and Windows display settings that college resolutions take appeared. In terms of its effects, information technology's more akin to a very powerful form of anti-aliasing rather than actually increasing your desktop display (hence it'southward OGSSAA alias).

The fob behind this is that when y'all select this higher resolution, your graphics carte du jour renders the full resolution, but and then squeezes it down to fit on your screen which offers crisper images, less jaggies and more screen space. Note that this puts as much strain on your graphics card as it would to actually use that higher resolution, then in games in particular, expect a large operation hit unless y'all have a powerful card. With older games, even so, you lot're laughing.

Downsampling on AMD: Virtual Super Resolution

For a couple of years at present AMD has included downsampling in its driver packages under the snazzy title of "Virtual Super Resolution." Finding it is easy. Just open your Radeon Settings, and the "Virtual Super Resolution" option will be right there. Click information technology to turn it on, and your screen may go blank for a second, but will then reappear (still in its original resolution).

Merely now you'll accept extra resolution options unlocked, depending on the base of operations resolution of your monitor. Then if you lot have a 1080p display, you can crank your resolution up to 1440p or 4K, and 1600 x 900 resolutions can go up to 1080p while 1440p/QHD displays become up to 3200 x 1800.

You can increase your desktop resolution by right-clicking on the desktop, then clicking "Display settings," only don't look great results. The existent effects volition be tangible when you use these higher resolutions during gaming.

Downsampling on Nvidia: Dynamic Super Resolution

Nvidia'southward equivalent downsampling function is chosen "Dynamic Super Resolution" (DSR) and does much the same thing. Become to your Nvidia Command Console, click "Manage 3D Settings" in the pane on the left, then find "DSR – Factors" in the box and select the resolutions you'd similar to downsample from. You lot tin can tick a few resolutions, so they'll all be bachelor to you from now on.

If you lot find that the picture quality during gaming looks too rough or that text isn't clear, or conversely if the image looks also blurred to your liking, you can go dorsum to the Nvidia Control Panel and change the "DSR – Smoothness" setting into one that gets things looking how y'all like them. My personal preference is to stick smoothness at xv%.

Conclusion

Downsampling is ane of the best ways to smooth out the image quality on your gaming rig. It doesn't work uniformly well beyond all games, however, so you'll need to but try information technology out on a game-by-game basis, and see where it works best.

Is this article useful?

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox