PC Lossless Scaling

Ive searched the forums here and struggled to find any definitive guides for Lossless Scaling that relate directly to TSW. It’s an absolute maze to me and I’m struggling to get it set correctly. Does such a thing exist?

I’ve followed the instructions in Jetwash’s lighting enhancement manual but I’m not very good with numbers so I can’t for the life of me figure out the correct settings for my display. I want to run the game at 60fps (if possible) at 4k native on my 120hz display.


Im also getting noticeable lag despite this never being an issue previous to me installing LS. My display is VRR and has been great so far

 

I wouldn’t bother with Lossless Scaling to be honest. More trouble than its worth with little gain for most people myself included.

 

Ive got to say, that certainly tallies with my experience these past few hours as its created lots of problems and solved zero. That said, I have absolutely no idea what I am doing in there so theres a chance its that

 

I use Lossless Scaling to help with frame rates via the Frame Generation side of it which it handles perfectly fine. I don't bother with the upscaling side of it as I didn't like the end product when outputting at 1080p and upscaling to QHD so whether that's what others above are having issues with I'm not sure.


Anyway I set my QHD monitor to 120hz refresh rate, I have the game set to QHD resolution but with the max FPS set to 60fps.

Before running TSW I open LS and then start TSW as soon as the loading screen is open I click the "Scale" button then click back on the loading screen and the game is effectively running at 120fps as it inserts an extra frame for every frame the game outputs. For me this means I can have game settings on Ultra/Very High and be using the lighting mod at Ultra and if a route drops to FPSs in the 30s lets say I'm still actually seeing frame rates in the 60s. (Most routes have a constant 45-60fps so 90-120fps in reality)


I've screen grabbed how I have LS setup..... The second image is to explain the slider so as you can see it says 75% when running in QHD resolution. If you are outputting at 4k then you set that slider to 50%.

I wouldn't be without it now as it means my frame rates are great pretty much all the time.

 

TBH I used it a few times, but only really needed it on WCML Shap. Since then there have been a few performance improvements anyway so I just drop my resolution to 1440p if a route seems to be struggling, though generally keep at 4K. Quite happy with 25 - 30 FPS.

 

This is very informative thank you. Am I correct in thinking that with this, I could set the target FPS to 30, boost the graphics, activate this and achieve 60?

 

Yes your PC only has to work at outputting at 30fps so saves some resources.

 

I think that's just a thing that some people are more sensitive to.(A little like the old style heated windscreens in cars that have the wiggly elements down them and which I personally cannot deal with) I found that the issue you mention is negligible at 2x creation but very noticeable at 3x creation. I notice a very slight amount of it around the edges of the wipers but nowhere else. (My fps is usually 40-60fps so i'm seeing 80-120fps) The fact I'm getting far smoother game play on modern complex routes with everything maxed out and nearly 200 game enhancing mods on a laptop RTX4070 far, far outweighs the slight distortion I see around the wipers.

 

After finding the 36 FPS trick in combination with LFC I don't need to play at 60 or more FPS. Tried Lossless Scaling and other Frame Generation but while the game might show 80 FPS it still did not feel smooth. Still had micro stutters and looked worse.

 

As it says in the instructions for lossless scaling, your computer needs to be able to maintain your ‘base’ FPS at all times. If it can’t then you need to lower your graphics settings until it can. Like it or not, the days of raw GPU horsepower are over, and frame generation, supersampling and deep learning are the future. Nvidia and AMD have decided that for us, so the sooner that’s understood really the better.

Regarding lossless scaling specifically, the example is as follows;

You have a 60hz monitor and as a result are targeting 60fps. You set the game to 30fps and use lossless scaling in x2 mode (frame gen only) to double that to 60. The absolutely critical part of it is that you must have your game setup so it can maintain 30fps under virtually all circumstances. If your base fps is fluctuating all over the place then of course frame gen (be it hardware, driver or software based) is going to struggle. You can do 20fps base and use x3 mode but again, as the instructions say, you will start to experience issues the more ‘fake’ frames you generate. In response to the OP, my laptop is a 240hz screen but I use the above settings (30x2=60) and it is absolutely golden with no artefacts etc, just a smooth and consistent 60fps.

It is also worth noting that Nvidia have now released something called ‘fluid motion frames’ as part of their recent driver packages with the newer versions of DLSS/DLAA. Whilst TSW can’t take advantage of the latter because it is still running on DX11 and not using this new technology, if you have any 40series or better card you can set fluid motion up very easily and it probably does a better job than LS because it is driver based. It works beautifully with TSW6.

The important thing with all of this stuff is putting the time in to understanding how it works (hint, there are a gazillion tutorials on YouTube for all of it) then make sure it is set up correctly. Once you get it it’s all very straightforward. To sum up, Lossless scaling is a great tool, but if it’s not set up as it should be it will undoubtedly make your experience worse.

 

I tried that but was not pleased with the result. It might work in other games well but for my the experience was not as smooth as I wanted. The 36 FPS + LFC setting (on a 144Hz Monitor) I explain here https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/how-focusing-on-60-fps-might-ruin-your-experience.96588/
...had (at least for me) much better results, especially combined with a few other .ini tweaks outlined in the thread.

I did not even know LFC was a thing but it works wonders in TSW. Might not be as good as Frame Generation in other kind of games like shooters. But for TSW it had the best results with my setup

 

You’re talking about AMD, I’m talking about Nvidia. It’s good to know there are perfectly workable solutions for both though.

 

AMD has its own version of fluid motion frames and of course I tried that. Not sure if the Nvidia version of Fluid Motion frame generation is that much better

 

Thanks for pointing to that thread - because of the title I wouldn't have clicked on it in the first place. I will give it a try in the next days because I am also not 100% satisfied with the frame generation by the lossless scaling program

 

Yeah the title might not be the best. would be interesting to know if this also worked for you

 

I really struggled with LS
it can add a bit of an increase to the frame rate before it starts going a bit odd. I dont think the increase was really worth the messing about.
Two things that made me stop using it.
1) everything turns to goop when you are quickly rotating a camera
2) my mouse curser disappears.

Instead, I learned much more about using the ini engine better and the Nvidia app settings can help too. Just being better aware of how they work is vastly superior.

 

If everything turns to goop when you’re panning the camera it’s not set up correctly because that shouldn’t be happening.

 

Sounds like you have the setting/tickbox selected to remove/hide cursor/pointer.

(see my two images attached up near the top of this thread)