One of the holy grails used in console is the so-called Dynamic Resolution Scaling , which is part of the success and magic that both SONY and Microsoft incorporate into their consumer products. This technique makes many users think that they are enjoying their games at a resolution, when what their consoles are doing is far from it. What exactly is it and how does it work?
There are many users who claim that their consoles can run certain games under 4K , and even others claim that they can go up to 1080p and 60 FPS . But what they do not know is that the optimization available to both PS4 and Xbox allows them to adapt many settings so that, without the user noticing, maintaining the FPS at the expense of graphic quality.
Dynamic Resolution Scaling, technology deceives the poorly trained eye
We all know how limited the power of current consoles is and even so the developers make the games look great. The FPS rate will always be a problem due to the different graphic loads and the consequent drops depending on the scenarios, something that seriously damages the player’s experience and can cause him to win or lose the game.
SONY and Microsoft are aware, so they designed different techniques at the time based on the same objective and pattern called Dynamic Resolution Scaling . This is nothing more than a technique that is used in the representation of frames in real time and that is used in different games (these have to be compatible through its engine) to offer a more stable frame rate.
Obviously there has to be a damage along the way, you can’t get free FPS by magic, so the damaged one is resolution. As its name suggests, DRS manages to lower the resolution to the areas on the screen that are very heavy, very difficult to process on the GPU, while the areas of each frame that are lighter maintain the native resolution.
Typically, low resolution areas are attempted to be out of the user’s central field of view to maintain overall quality impression.
Multiple resolutions for the same frame
The result of using DRS is that the game in question is not processed in a single final resolution, but depending on the implementation of the engine, several different resolutions can be obtained.
The key is provided by real-time rendering of the GPU. Normally the frames are offered at a single resolution, but it is the engine and its API that determine the areas of the screen where said resolution will fall and, above all, to which scale.
If the engine predicts that one area of the image will be rendered much slower than another, it scales down by lower resolution, allowing the FPS rate to be preserved. This ensures that the average FPS rate is consistent and that there are no sudden drops in frames that hinder performance and the gaming experience.
This technique has nothing to do with VRS on PC, although they are two ways of achieving more performance, but in the latter, what is avoided is shading external parts of the image, focusing everything on where the player is presumably focusing his sight and for therefore there is no resolution variation like in Dynamic Resolution Scaling .