So what exactly is Render Scale? I have been having GPU issues to where it runs loud (fan wise) so over the past week been messing with settings, and today I found out it I lower my render scale from 100% which my current display mode is 2560x1440 as thats my monitor to either 75% 1920x1080 or 50% 1280x720 my GPU runs better.
My question is shouldn’t the graphics look worse when lowering? Cause I see no difference from 200% to down 50% and lowering it helps…
Render Scale is basically the same thing as changing your resolution, just without actually having to change resolution. All of the game world elements (so not your UI) get rendered at the new resolution and then scaled using the method listed in your Resample Quality to fit whatever actual resolution your display is running. Because it’s being rendered to a “virtual” display first this lets you go both up and down in resolution.
The idea is that a Render Scale above 100% is the same as Super Sampling or SSAA - a brute-force method of antialiasing that works on everything, but it’s also the least performant option so has the biggest impact on frame rates. The four Resample methods are fairly similar here, though it’s generally best to avoid Point resampling as it’s likely to introduce “crawling” (temporal or motion aliasing) when things move.
Below 100% is designed to increase performance by reducing the load on your graphics card, at the expense of a worse final image. Fewer pixels means fewer fine details. Depending on your chosen Resample Quality, the amount of visible loss will vary. Point is the simplest filter and will look the worst as you simply get the lower resolution image (nearly) unaltered, Bilinear is a basic blur, Bicubic is a more advanced blur, and FSR will attempt to reconstruct the now-missing detail back to full resolution (with varying levels of success) based on your chosen Resample Sharpness.
If you don’t notice the difference visually (and a lot of the time you won’t unless you go too far, look at text like name tags, or are explicitly looking for it rather than playing the game) then there’s no harm at all in lowering the scale and enjoying the performance benefits. This is exactly the same principle that DLSS, FSR, and XeSS operate on in titles that support them, though each of these uses different methods to attempt to reconstruct the image to a higher resolution afterwards.
Note that Render Scale is also currently broken, and has been since 10.0. It works visually, but you will lose performance even by lowering the value as well as increasing it. I’ve no idea why. But this is probably why your fans are running lower, as not only will it be rendering less per frame but it’s also likely to be rendering less frames overall.
Thank you very much, yeah so I have Anti Aliasing, Triple Buff, VSync and Ray Trace all disabled mainly just rocking fullscreen windowed, 2560x1440 Resolution but Rendered at 720p, Got Low latency on Nvidia Reflex + Boost, Graphics quality at a 5, Texture FIltering at 16x, Ambient Occlusion and Resample at Fidelity FX.
So basically got almost everything turned off, and have to turn my Rendered Resolution to 720p or 50% of 1440p and my GPU doesn’t begin to go loud after awhile of usage.
It’s basicly an upscaling resolution thing. A Fancy sharpener.