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Has lowering the resolution of your 4k TV ever actually benefitted older sub 1080p CONSOLE games?

Knightime_X

Member
With PC its pretty much irrelevant.
I've always wondered the possibilities and will probably experiment in the near future.
But for those out there who've done this, did you have any success at all?

Tvs today use scalers and just scale your console game to the native resolution of the TV and call it a day.
If that's the case then is there ANY benefit to manually lowering it yourself for those kind of games say 720p or even 480p?

Would a 480p/720p game look better on a 4k monitor if you lowered the resolution instead of relying on the upscaler to pick up the slack?
 

Allandor

Member
Short answer, no.

Tvs and consoles have scalers. If the console gives out a 720p image the tv scales its up to the native resolution. This adds additional lag and normally tv scalers aren't the best.
If you now have a sub 1080p game and output 1080p the console and the tv will scale and both introduce their own artifacts.
Optimal case is the console scales and outputs native resolution for the tv. This reduces additional lag by the tv (picture processing should be minimal) and removes the need to scale the image a second time.

E.g. early PS3 games often outputed in their internal resolution which could lead to really bad image quality as the scaler in the TV was often quite bad.
 
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Rea

Member
What do you mean by lowering the resolution of 4K tv? Its impossible to lower the resolution on the TV. The TV's image processor will always upscale whenever the input resolution from the source is lower than TV's native.
 

assurdum

Banned
With PC its pretty much irrelevant.
I've always wondered the possibilities and will probably experiment in the near future.
But for those out there who've done this, did you have any success at all?

Tvs today use scalers and just scale your console game to the native resolution of the TV and call it a day.
If that's the case then is there ANY benefit to manually lowering it yourself for those kind of games say 720p or even 480p?

Would a 480p/720p game look better on a 4k monitor if you lowered the resolution instead of relying on the upscaler to pick up the slack?
Nope. But if you have a TV with a good upscaler it will save you the day. I'll never tired to say with a recent Bravia TV, toggling the sharpness and the reality creation to the max, the improvement in clarity is immense for 1080p and sub1080p games. Unfortunately it can broken the IQ in some games with reconstructed resolution.
 
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yerorno01.jpg
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
I wish I could lower the resolution of a digital TV to suit the content’s resolution.

I’d actually be content if there was an option to play in “window mode” on a TV.
 
I set the output of my PC to 1440p/120hz, it doesn't support 4K/120hz (and my GPU wouldn't be able to handle it anyway).

The end result looks better to me because things in the game are rendered at a higher resolution before the TV upscales it. But if I'm being honest even with a 50" TV very close to my face the difference are very slight, usually what gives it away is aliasing but games now already handle it much better anyway.

Console games do that all the time these day, they use all sort of internal resolution and even change it on the fly and I don't see anything really complaining about that, it really hard to tell.
 
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DaGwaphics

Member
If you think older games are too soft on the higher res set, maybe find a lower res monitor and play those older games from that display. At one point I tested my X1 connected to a 720p tv and there was a difference in how games looked between the two. The games running at 900p and lower have a softness on the 1080p screen that doesn't exist on the 720p. Might be something to consider.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
LCDs and OLEDs have fixed resolution, what you're talking about isn't a thing. The only way it could even happen would be to display the game in a window.

I wish I could lower the resolution of a digital TV to suit the content’s resolution.

I’d actually be content if there was an option to play in “window mode” on a TV.

1080p would be a window a quarter of the size of the screen, and lower resolutions would be even smaller of course. You'd need a microscope for 480p lol.
 

Zeroing

Banned
Nope. But if you have a TV with a good upscaler it will save you the day. I'll never tired to say with a recent Bravia TV, toggling the sharpness and the reality creation to the max, the improvement in clarity is immense for 1080p and sub1080p games. Unfortunately it can broken the IQ in some games with reconstructed resolution.
Yep my tv has a good upscaler and that is the only way I think it will make lower resolution games “look better”
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
1080p would be a window a quarter of the size of the screen, and lower resolutions would be even smaller of course. You'd need a microscope for 480p lol.
True. But with today’s huge screens, even a quarter of a 65” is as big if not bigger than the average 1080p TV we used to play PS360 on, and it’d be low-res enough to make even 480p acceptable when upscaled.
 

Knightime_X

Member
Lol, you clearly haven't got even the slightest clue.

You think you have a selectable option on your tv that somehow changes it's resolution right?
I never said you can do that.
I've yet to see a TV offer this. Would be awesome if they did. If you could manually set it directly from the TV then I wouldn't even ask.
But when your TV claims to support a lower resolution natively and set the console to the same resolution, does it make a difference?

Like setting the hardware to 1440p (Say Xbox Series X) which would change the resolution of the TV to 1440p (if your monitor supports it)
Would that make something like 720p look slightly less shitty on a 4k monitor in 1440p mode or have absolutely no change at all?

zDlvEDg.jpg
 

baphomet

Member
I never said you can do that.
I've yet to see a TV offer this. Would be awesome if they did. If you could manually set it directly from the TV then I wouldn't even ask.
But when your TV claims to support a lower resolution natively and set the console to the same resolution, does it make a difference?

Like setting the hardware to 1440p (Say Xbox Series X) which would change the resolution of the TV to 1440p (if your monitor supports it)
Would that make something like 720p look slightly less shitty on a 4k monitor in 1440p mode or have absolutely no change at all?

zDlvEDg.jpg

No matter what you set the input to it will be upscaled to 3840x2160 because that is the only resolution the TV can display.
 

radewagon

Member
Sorry OP, as many have stated already, the resolution of your set is fixed. So, it'll always be 4k. You can change the output resolution that is being sent by the console, but whatever you send (if it's not 4k), the TV will need to scale it to 4k.

There is some versatility to be had, but not much. For example, if your TV is better at scaling content up to 4k than your console is, then it might give you a boost to let the TV do the scaling instead of the console. This probably isn't the case, though, and will likely add lag. An option (for consoles that can't send 4k signals) is to get a scaler for low resolution content because that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for your TV and produce a better image with less lag. I've had good results with 720p content using the mClassic dongle and amazing results using the Retrotink 5x with sub 720p content.

Depending on what you are trying to do and how much you are willing to spend, there are some great options out there.
 
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