Is 1280 still relevant?

[xxx3me]

I know resolution is not THAT important for many people, the story has major role on the fun, right? This seems to be a common sense, as I have noticed searching the forum.

But anyway, I'm still unsure about my current project resolution. I'm using 1280 x 720, rendering at 3840 x 2160 and then resizing to get rid of possible artifact (and having some room for less visible Photoshop editions in the final product). My machine really sucks (1050ti and i3) so my renders take a long time busy to have a "very high" quality. I am considering rendering at 1920 – which may cause them to have slightly lower quality even after the downscaling.

So, I'd appreciate opinions:

• Are there many project in 1280 x 720 right now, or is it more like an "outdated technology"?
• Do you care if the game is 1280 or 1920? Do it make a real difference for you?
• Between a game with very sharp images vs not-so-sharp images, the first in a huge pack (like 5 Gb vs 1 Gb), thoughts? (Because I noticed that using webp, the images don't have the same quality of PNG or high-quality JPG, but the size... Oh man...)

 

[Deleted member 609064]

I like erotica, which is only text. Someone will prefer images and text. Some like voice and sound as well.

A lot of people download compressed versions of games because they consume less bandwidth and have a smaller footprint on our hard drives.

Show us some of the images so people can compare the quality outputs against each other. Ideally, it's the same scene just rendered at different resolutions.

 

[Rich]

Just my $0.02's worth

• Are there many project in 1280 x 720 right now, or is it more like an "outdated technology"?

I don't know about "many," but that's what I'm doing mine at. Lessens the rendering time noticeably, which means I have time to render longer animations.

• Do you care if the game is 1280 or 1920? Do it make a real difference for you?

Personally, I don't. I don't usually play games at full-screen anyway, so when "windowed" they're probably half-way in between 1280 and 1920. But, then, I'm a dinosaur...

• Between a game with very sharp images vs not-so-sharp images, the first in a huge pack (like 5 Gb vs 1 Gb), thoughts? (Because I noticed that using webp, the images don't have the same quality of PNG or high-quality JPG, but the size... Oh man...)

I go for size. I almost always go for the compressed version of games, which have had their image quality reduced somewhat. Similarly, I don't tend to build things even with the JPG's that Daz Studio turns out, much less PNG's - I always reduce their size. Also, note that there is a non-trivial segment of your potential audience that doesn't have high-speed Internet, and may never even attempt to download a 5 Gb game.

Basically, I don't spend my time looking at the individual pixels with a magnifying glass, so the slight loss of quality that reduced size produces just doesn't bother me.

As I said, just my $0.02. Others may have diametrically opposed opinions.

 

[Choo-choo]

Pretty sure that majority of Personal Computers and Smartphones have lower than FullHD resolution

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(look at Top 10 Screen Resolutions)

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should be no problems with HD images in game

 

[Morgan42]

Oh thank God someone asked this. I've been wondering this too with my current project.

So, I'm doing the exact same thing as you. rendering at 1280 for full iterations was still giving me bad fireflies and rendering for the same time at 3840 and resizing cut out the fireflies and gave me actually slightly better detail (I spent two full days testing this).

I started my project at 1280 resolution because that's what some work I did for a non-erotic ren'py project asked for, so I was used to it. After rendering about 15 images, I was wondering if I should just switch or stick with it. I decided to just stick with it.

I'm fairly confident most people play it windowed anyway so they could quickly minimize it if they have to.

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one who was worried about this.

 

[Winterfire]

From my experience...
I have a laptop (1366x768 display), after 6 years I had to upgrade and chose a desktop instead.
My old monitor (1280x1024) began to malfunction so I had to buy a new one: I literally looked for the cheapest monitor I could find, and the trend I have noticed is that 1920x1080 was common among all the monitors, with anything higher such as 4K being the more expensive options.

1920x1080 seems to be the new standard, so if you are starting to make a game now, I would choose 1920x1080.
I would say that 1280 is no longer relevant at this point.

 

[mickydoo]

Why render at a higher rate then downsize to 1280x720. I started with a 1050 card and used to render at 3200x1800 and resize to 1920x1080. In my personal opinion, if a game has great graphics and hot girls anything less than 1920x1080 ruins it for me. From a dev view, I can't see the point of putting all the time and effort into renders just to make them smaller.

 

[Winterfire]

I do not understand the downscaling tbh. It is a fake "gain" of quality, it is much like seeing a thumbnail of something which looks much better than the actual picture.
I had missed that part, but if you have to downscale from that size, you may as well just downscale to 1920x1080 then.

1280 is too ancient imho anyways.
It would need to scale up even on a cheap laptop (1366x768), and even more on a cheap 1920x1080 monitor.
You are basically scaling down to 1280x720 only for the majority of users to automatically scale it back up again, the quality will suffer a lot.

Also, keep in mind that Ren'Py will scale your assets up/down automatically.

 

[mickydoo]

I do not understand the downscaling tbh.

I always rendered the images until there was no grain and then resized them because that's just how I started. You get it into your head that the downsized images look sharper, you could argue the point til the cows come home on that one. I don't do it anymore though.

 

[Morgan42]

I've tested it using ren'py on a separate computer whose resolution uses 1920. You don't notice a difference.

 

[xxx3me]

Thanks everyone for your inputs, I will have it all in mind before making my decisions.

Why render at a higher rate then downsize to 1280x720. I started with a 1050 card and used to render at 3200x1800 and resize to 1920x1080. In my personal opinion, if a game has great graphics and hot girls anything less than 1920x1080 ruins it for me. From a dev view, I can't see the point of putting all the time and effort into renders just to make them smaller.

Pretty much what Morgan42 said: rendering straight at 1280, some renders had fireflies, no matter how much I was trying different lights and configurations. And time wasn't helping: this image took 8 HOURS and well... (a detail because the original is 8 Mb)



Anyway, rendering at 3840 and scaling down, I guess the result was better than using Photoshop filters over a native 1280 image. I'll have to spend a few days testing 1920 or 3840 scaled to 1920 to see what happens...

 

[mickydoo]

Thanks everyone for your inputs, I will have it all in mind before making my decisions.



Pretty much what Morgan42 said: rendering straight at 1280, some renders had fireflies, no matter how much I was trying different lights and configurations. And time wasn't helping: this image took 8 HOURS

View attachment 774266

Post your render settings, even with 1050 that should take less than one hour not 8

 

[xxx3me]

Setting I've been using (here with 7200 secs, 8 hours was a try to see what would happen, not so great improvement over others rendering for two hours, to be honest):

 

[mickydoo]

Setting I've been using (here with 7200 secs, 8 hours was a try to see what would happen, not so great improvement over others rendering for two hours, to be honest):

View attachment 774506

When I was using my 1050 the stupid simple render settings where this. I still use it for test renders apart from the oversampling.

3200x1800 Pixel size
Max samples 500
Render quality enabled off
Max path length 7
Post denoiser all three settings on start iteration at 499
Don't touch anything else

On the render settings tab click on defaults to reset it all before you try those settings, what some of your options are what they are is beyond me.

In theory that should make an acceptable render. Of course, you can up the iterations and set the denoiser one under whatever you set it, and yes you can not use the denoiser but you have to render for a lot longer. I use way more samples and use the denoiser sometimes and sometimes not (I have upgraded my card and one would hope learned a bit), but for a starting point, this is good.

Also, go here and get a HDRI for the light source, better light always helps.

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All the other settings in the render tab are for advanced options, I never use them sticking to the KISS method myself.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Not sure 99% post SSIM is a great setting. I made various test with SSIM, and maybe I'm doing something wrong but all of them were subpar.

SSIM is 'deep-learning' AI that predict when a render has fully converged by comparing images that share same similarity. It looks nice on paper but in practice I found "Rendering Quality Enable" to be way more useful when I use it. You can't have both (SSIM & Rendering Quality) at the same time, if you put value in "Rendering quality" and "Rendering converged Ratio", they will be ignored if you enable SSIM.

Max path length at 7 is quite low if you are fishing for details imo. And I found rendering at native resolution is better and faster at equal quality than down-sampling but that's me.

 

[GNVE]

Do you care if the game is 1280 or 1920? Do it make a real difference for you?

Well it depends on how big your project is. If you have a project that will be finished in the next year (maybe next two or three years) then you can get away with 1280. If you expect your project to take longer to be finished I'd go for 1920 at the very least.
My reasoning: Currently the vast majority of people are still gaming on a 1920p or lower resolution display. so 1280 is definitely good enough even when scaling to Full HD. I do think however since 4K displays aren't that expensive anymore and my guess is that in the next few years most people will start to jump to that resolution. and then 1920p is definitely the better option (scaling is a simple 4x and the extra detail in the image will be noticable).

Between a game with very sharp images vs not-so-sharp images, the first in a huge pack (like 5 Gb vs 1 Gb), thoughts? (Because I noticed that using webp, the images don't have the same quality of PNG or high-quality JPG, but the size... Oh man...)

again depends on the size of the project. In a smaller project you can get away with bigger image sizes while in larger projects I'd go with smaller image sizes. One thing you could try is

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it drops the size of an HD PNG file from 2-4 MB to 500KB - 1MB (average -70% in file size from the original and about twice the size from webp from what I can see) without a drop in quality. And I compared the original to small image side by side.

 

[xxx3me]

All the other settings in the render tab are for advanced options, I never use them sticking to the KISS method myself.

I see. The settings I'm playing more are Max Time and Luminance + Environment Intensity, they seem to have high impact over light, fireflies, etc. I didn't see many difference from let's say, 500 or 1000 samples (neither using very long render times like 8 hours for considerably complex scenes, 4 character plus buildings, clothes etc).

 

[Alcahest]

Personally I would never use anything lower than 1080, unless the game was aimed at handheld devices or game size was a major concern. Even if many use laptops with lower resolution than 1080p, for desktop computers 1080p has been the standard for many years. I mean, I've had my 1080p monitor since 2009, and now we're seeing 4K screens coming out (2160p).

Btw, odd terminology used in this thread. The standard is to refer to the height, not the width, when talking about resolutions down to the pixel count. 1920x1080 is 1080. There is no such thing as 1920p.

 

[GNVE]

Btw, odd terminology used in this thread. The standard is to refer to the height, not the width, when talking about resolutions down to the pixel count. 1920x1080 is 1080. There is no such thing as 1920p.

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