Gaming Zelda BOTW uses Dynamic Resolution Scaling to maintain 30fps

WiiUBricker

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The folks at eurogamer's Digital Foundry have further digged into the technical aspect of Zelda BOTW and revealed a new piece of discovery. It was previously stated that Zelda renders in 900p when docked and 720p when undocked. While those resolutions are true, it has issues maintaining 30fps at all times however. That's why it uses a technique that's called Dynamic Resolution Scaling. This technique decreases the resolution in processor intensive scenes from 1600x900 to 1440x810 (docked) and from 1280x720 to 1152x648 (undocked) in order to maintain 30fps. It appears this isn't exclusive to the Nintendo Switch game, because the Wii U game uses the same DRS.

:arrow: Source, via
 
Last edited by WiiUBricker, , Reason: typo

Enteking

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But it doesn't even maintain stable 30 FPS.
Instead of bringing the resolution down, they should set it to 900p fixed and dynamically turn off Anti-Aliasing and decrease shadow and effect detail and quality when needed. Resolution and texture detail should never be touched because they have a major impact on the perceived image quality.

Anti-Aliasing just makes the image blurry and eats up tons of hardware resources, I always turn it off because every game looks better and sharper and runs much faster without it in my opinion.
 
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DrkBeam

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So the rumors of Sub HD at least on portable mode were true, it's an interesting finding, I thought Zelda bow always was capped at 720p on portable mode
 

Enteking

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I always wondered why the game does look so blurry and foggy at times, and other times it looks crystal clear. They seem to use a really bad scaling algorithm when reducing the resolution. On Wii-U the graphics often look extremely bad, ugly and washed out and this seems to caused by this internal rendering resolution change.

And in Karikaro, when the game runs at 15 FPS at night, I alwyas thought to myself why they don't scale down shadows and light effects. Most of the shaders used look bad anyway, so these could be optimized to prioritize speed. In shader programming, minimal changes can have a very large impact on performance and resource usage and really good programmers can get things looking better while reducing the hardware load at the same time.
 

Luckkill4u

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Just going to say that it's nothing new in the game developing industry. For example The Witcher 3 renders at 1080p on the PS4 but has dynamic resolution scaling for the Xbox One version it renders somewhere between 900p to 1080p depending on the workload of the GPU. It's all about keeping those frames locked and it's really only useful in fast paced games. I personally don't think Nintendo has the algorithm perfected yet so it could be the saving grace for the frame rate issues for the game if an update comes out. 343 Industries did a very good job in using this on Halo 5 and probably because of Microsoft's support. Halo 5 is incredibly smooth and when this become more crowded on the screen the engine is very smart on what to drop pixels from to keep frames locked at 60fps while keeping the drop in visual quality not noticeable. Say the player is driving a warthog through some heavy foliage without dynamic scaling the frames would have shuddered to 40fps but with dynamic scaling the engine scales the foliage at 810p while using motion blur to mask the drop in pixels.
 

Nemix77

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It's a port (fine by me), so my guess is Nintendo has already starting working on ideas for a year now on the next Zelda game for the Switch.
 

Enteking

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They should better scale down resource-heavy shadows, lighting and shader effects. The game sometimes looks really bad, everything gets grayish and foggy very often, environments are often covered in smog like in a big Asian city. A hope these are not side-effects of the resolution scaling.

In my opinion the resolution should be set to a fixed crisp and clear 1080p and everything else should be cut down to allow a stable frame rate.
 
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Qtis

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As much as I would like to waddle an e-Pen around with benchmark scores and the likes, I'd take FPS over resolution any day. A smooth, stable-ish low FPS is a lot better than fluctuating FPS regardless of average FPS. While an average/median 60 fps or even more is nice, it is a pain if the curve is from a nice 2 fps slideshow to 144 fps "perfect score". Hopefully they find a fix for this, as the hardware itself most likely won't be upgraded in the near future..
 

YourHero

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Theres been some rumor that the switch is throttling itself looking for wifi signals, and some others seem to think its unoptimized because it was originally intended for Wii U. I have no sources, just word of mouth. So I'm optimistic about them fixing it with a firmware update.
 

s157

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The resolution decrease is noticeable, but only if you're actively looking for it. Most of the time it'll fly right by you unnoticed. Still though, there are people who pay extreme attention to detail and this might irk them.
 

Minasodrom

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Anti-Aliasing just makes the image blurry and eats up tons of hardware resources, I always turn it off because every game looks better and sharper and runs much faster without it in my opinion.

??? i think your confusing what anti aliasing is. there is no blur, maybe you mean dof?
only blur is with post prosessing aa, which is not very common.
and scaling effect and shadow details would be a terrible idea, res is the least noticable because of good upscaling.
 
Last edited by Minasodrom,

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