Non-native resolution in game with Nvidia Optimus

TL;DR Does the Intel iGPU scale the resolution you set for a game to the current desktop resolution if the two resolutions are different?

Longer version: This is the first Nvidia Optimus laptop I've owned. I've owned two previous laptops with Nvidia dGPU's and another AMD one before that. While trying to diagnose a problem I was having in Metro Last Light, where the performance in-game would tank after 10-15 seconds into actual gameplay (on my Lenovo y50 w / gtx 860m) to ~15fps and permanently stay low regardless of graphics settings, I noticed something very peculiar - dropping the in-game resolution had very little effect on image quality so long as I kept the resolution in-line with the aspect ratio (16x9). Even 1280x720 had a very, very minimal impact on image quality in game, which is crazy because non-native resolutions should have an immediate drop in image quality, and going as low as 1280x720 should be VERY, VERY noticeable. I still wasn't getting my performance issue resolved (although I did figure that out, but that is beside the point), and the lack of image quality degradation piqued my interest so I wanted to run some benchmarks to see if dropping the resolution affected performance despite only the very minor image quality loss I was seeing. I loaded up Batman AO - which, btw, also experiences only a very, very minor drop in image quality - (side note: Metro Last Light's benchmark utility was apparently removed in the patch that came out late last week...), ran some benchmark loops and took some screenshots via steam overlay. And sure enough, there were performance improvements when going with lower resolutions. To back up my theory, the text size in Batman at the main menu and during the load screen remained unchanged (at 1280x720 the text should have appeared fairly large). The screenshots though, were definitely output to the resolution set in game. And again, the only time there was obvious resolution scaling distortion was when using a resolution that did not adhere to the 16x9 aspect ration.

Sooooo.......nice bonus, weird bug, or am I dumb and blind?

 

Depending on the game, the lower resolution doesn't necessarily look that much worse than at native. If you were to drop your desktop resolution to 720p though on a 1080p LCD, it would look noticeably worse.

But you're right, MetroLL benchmark is now gone. Wonder why they did that?

 

Yeah, it sucks that Steam removed The Metro: Last Light benchmark. As far as I can tell there was no reason for it. They did that to Batman Arkham Asylum as well.

Luckily, I had a drive image I could extract it from. All you need is the MetroLLbenchmark.exe file. If anyone wants it, I backed it up to the cloud [ LINK] in case I ever need to replace it again later on. I just dropped it into the Steam folder along side the game executable and it works fine.

 

Thanks. I was going to look to see if I had it in my historical backup, but the on you provided works great. I read on Steam forums that it was a mistake and will be added back. How true that it, I don't know. Just silly how they would get rid of it.

 

I lack ESP. What is your native resolution? gpu? cpu? laptop? You are failing to tell us basic information here that is required.