Optimal game resolution?

[JagerMammon]

What is the best resolution for visual novels? Obviously considering nice clear images vs large file size?

 

[CocoVC]

Anything with a 16:9 ratio: 1280x720p, 1920x1080p, 3940x2160p (aka 4k) are the most common ones.
You can compress png images to webp to decrease file size.

 

[khumak]

The best size is whatever the largest resolution you can render at without the need for optimizations to fit within the VRAM on your video card.

 

[Crimson Delight Games]

This is purely personal preference, but I feel like 1920x1080 is a good middle ground.

 

[baneini]

The human eye can't see images over 720p

 

[UpAfterTen]

I like 1920x1080 and that seems to be the maximum that RenPy supports at the moment which is how most of the VNs I've been playing lately are created. One of the nice things about Visual Novels is the graphics are mostly static, and as such they don't seem to look like shit when scaled up in the way other games with movement might.

 

[woody554]

fun theoretical fact from signal processing to consider: if you resize a window down from 4k even 1 pixel, it's theoretically impossible to have better picture quality (ie. more information in it) than a full 1920x1080 image.

or the normal way of saying it: to get all information from an image through sampling, you need at minimum a 2x bigger sampling resolution.

so for everyone else except people running 4k native resolution at fullscreen, an unresized 1920x1080 image is better quality than a resized 4k one.

 

[khumak]

From past experience modding, even 720p generally looks fine. Babysitter was rendered in 720p so that's the resolution I used for my mod as well. Ironically, the dev for that game actually rendered at 4k and then downscaled it to 720p. I suspect he did that as sort of a poor man's denoiser before there were better options. A noisy 4k image downscaled to 720p potentially takes less time to render than a native 720p image that renders until all the fireflies are gone and has a similar effect to what a denoiser does when you downscale it.

 

[JagerMammon]

Thanks for all the responses

 

[DuniX]

1080 is pretty much the current standard.

 

[262177]

If you are still taking opinions, 16:9 ratio, either 720p (1280x720) or 1080p (1920x1080). I'm personally fine with 480p or even 320p but that's from spending too much time working at such resolutions so not applicable to modern era projects.

The use of layers for very similar lossless pictures such as multiple variations of a single base picture - which are made easy to use, combine and merge for many engines - should help you save a lot on filesize (if you're worried about this, this also makes ripping a bit less likely) and 720p pretty much ensures nothing will break from the resolution alone.

4K+ is overkill to me, but this is all subjective. Your audience may also include mobile users as the mobile market has significantly expanded over time and such users don't really require massive resolution in a release.

 

[DuniX]

Also a trick you can do is if you have BGs that aren't 16:9, which is most likely if you ever buy BG packs and don't exclusively do your own renders.
You can use IrfanView with Change Canvas Size and Fill Area With Blur Image.
Or use Photoshop with some Actions that do the same.

This way you will have BGs that are 16:9 that blend well enough with your 16:9 renders.
Especially if you have a more anime style like with Koikatu.

 

[JagerMammon]

Good idea, thanks