Which one would be less punishing on the GPU and still maintain legibility?
They should be about the same but why don’t you try and measure GPU load with AfterBurner OSD or something similar?
If you have an 1080p monitor then you should pick 1080p 50% because render scale doesn’t have an effect on the menus and hud so those are still drawn in crisp 1080p.
What GPU are you running?
Set your resolution to the native resolution of your display and then set render scale for performance.
If you have a 1080p display, then 1080p @ 50% is what you want. If you’re rendering at anything other than a power of two multiple of your native resolution it’s going to be a blurry image as it attempts to interpolate.
Well… nervous laughter
…its the 940MX
1080 @ 60 Hz is native. So 1080 at 50% will perform better than 720 at 75?
Both 1080p@50% and 720p@75% would result in the same render resolution (960x540).
Using 720p will most likely make everything look a lot blurrier, though, since you’ll be taking the rendered image and then stretching it to 1280x720, and then stretching that again to fit the panel resolution.
1080p may have a teeny tiny performance hit just due to having to rasterize some more pixels for the UI and the upscale, but it should be pretty neligible compared to the cost of actually rendering the 3D content.
So I strongly suspect 1080p@50% is going to look a lot better and perform about the same. Feel free to just try both, though.
I tried both, and GPU temps were way higher on 1080p, going as high as 90-92 deg C whereas it was manageable on 720p with temps below 85 deg C all the time.
I would recommend using render scale before lowering the resolution. If you can’t get the desired framerate with render scale, lower the resolution.
The benefit of using render scales below 100% is that the UI elements aren’t being scaled down. Try it yourself in the training range. Render scale is far superior in terms of quality especially once the game tries to display healthbars.
Before I got a PC, I was running the game on 1080p@50% because setting it to 720p would have given me eye cancer, personally. I tried it for one game and it was awful. I rather see what’s going on without draining my eyes even more than already while getting about the same amount of FPS.
Also, your temperature seems mighty high. Are you playing on a laptop or desktop? When was the last time you cleaned it properly?