Godot Super Scaling 1.2.0 Shaders 3.4 Community

Submitted by user cybereality; MIT; 2022-01-27

A fast viewport scaler for 3D and 2D Godot Engine games that allows you to upscale or downscale the screen for increased performance or higher quality visuals. Supports up to 200% native resolution or down to 10%. At 50% scaling on a 3D game, you could potentially get 200% to 300% of native performance, which is key to getting higher quality graphics on low-end hardware. At scales like 90%, you could gain 25% performance with very minimal picture quality loss. Going above 100% does increase quality, however the performance cost is large and might only make sense for users with very high-end graphics cards.

- Add the SuperScaling.tscn scene to your main scene tree, it should be just below the root node.
- You can leave the rest of your scene tree the same, this add-on no longer requires any special node setup.
- To have UI or HUD elements rendered at native resolution, you should add them to the UI Nodes property.
- Select Enable on Play, this will start the scaling add-on when you play the game (cannot be viewed in editor).
- Set Usage to either 3D or 2D depending on your game type.
- MSAA and FXAA are controlled by the SuperScaling add-on and the project settings do not take effect.
- The SuperScaling add-on does add some anti-aliasing, however you may want to also enable MSAA or FXAA or both. For the best quality and performance, it is recommended to use 4x MSAA. At higher render scales, using FXAA can help soften the image. At scales of 75% or below, it is recommended to disable FXAA as it can worsen picture clarity.
- Shadow Atlas controls the shadow map size for omni and spot lights. If you only use a directional light you can set this to 1.
- To control the scale of the render, use the Scale Factor setting on the top of the inspector for SuperScaling.
- 1.0 for the Scale Factor corresponds to 100% of the native resolution. 0.5 will be 50% and 2.0 will be 200%.
- Setting the Scale Factor lower than 1.0 will lessen the picture quality slightly, but with much higher performance.
- Note that setting the Scale Factor above 1.0 results in higher definition but will have substantially lesser performance.
- Please experiment with your game and your desired minimum spec to find an appropriate setting.
- Also consider exposing the scale to users (within limits), so that they may tailor the experience to their level of hardware.
- Smoothness controls the mix between the two scaling algorithms. 0.0 is more sharp and 1.0 is softer.
- In general, leaving the Smoothness value at the default of 0.5 will have the best compatiblity at all scales.
- You should avoid setting Smoothness to the extremes. Values between 0.25 and 0.75 work best.
- However, this is an artistic choice and you should experiment to find the best value for your game.
- In the project settings, for 3D games, the Stretch Mode should be set to disabled and Stretch Aspect to ignore.
- For 2D games, the best project settings are 2d for Stretch Mode and keep_height for Stretch Aspect.
- Native resolution UI nodes for 3D games can be anywhere, as long as they are added to the UI Nodes property.
- For 2D games, you will need to create a Node2D and place your UI elements inside that. Then set the Z Index to 1 or above.
- Be sure that Use VSync is set to On in the project settings for the smoothest performance. Turning Use VSync to Off can result in stuttering and an overall choppy experience.
- One thing to note, SuperScaling will take control of your game while enabled, and you will no longer be able to edit as you play. Meaning changing variables in the inspector at run-time will not result in visible changes (though you can click the Remote tab on the left and edit values, if really necessary).
- So it is recommended to leave Enable on Play off while developing, and only enable the add-on when you need to test the graphics or performance.
- Since the add-on moves your game nodes into a dynamically generated viewport, using get_node() with absolute paths will no longer function. It is recommended to try to use relative paths as much as possible when getting nodes, and this is supported. There are some cases, though, where special care must be taken. In the case of scripts on the root node, and also when calling in or out of the dynamic viewport (e.g. for a UI node to affect a game object, or vice versa), since the node paths will change at run-time. In these cases, rather than absolute paths, you can use the find_node() function, which will work regardless of where the nodes might be. For example get_tree().get_root().find_node("Player", true, false). For this to work, though, all the nodes you are interested in getting this way must have unique names.