Will there be upscaling and frame generation options?

[kingsword]

In recent years, upscaling options have come to be pretty standard across the board for new games. And frame generation is slowly being adopted in options as well. Will EU5 have such options? I have tried third-party applications like Lossless Scaling in newer & heavier games like Vic3 but quality is a bit iffy.

I don't want to start an argument about "it needs/ it doesn't need" or "this is better/that is better", just that Paradox games have lacked it so far and I wonder if there's a plan to add these. An option is that after all, you use or don't use based on your own decision, optional.

 

[Sirbab]

In recent years, upscaling options have come to be pretty standard across the board for new games. And frame generation is slowly being adopted in options as well. Will EU5 have such options? I have tried third-party applications like Lossless Scaling in newer & heavier games like Vic3 but quality is a bit iffy.

I don't want to start an argument about "it needs/ it doesn't need" or "this is better/that is better", just that Paradox games have lacked it so far and I wonder if there's a plan to add these. An option is that after all, you use or don't use based on your own decision, optional.

I doubt it. I'd really appreciate it as I almost exclusively use lossless scaling with fg when I play pdx games these days, but there's no precedent for it with pdx I don't think.

 

[IlNimrod]

All I wish is that they let us put some workload on the GPU. Paradox games tend to cap CPUs before anything else.

 

[Sindai]

It's not really a matter of "letting." Paradox GSGs are performance limited by things that aren't amenable to GPU compute.

 

[Nitan17]

I'd be for it. At launch Victoria 3 ran okay for me CPU-wise but I had to turn down the graphical settings a lot because whenever I zoomed into the 3D map or characters were visible on the screen my GPU usage and fans went into max and FPS dropped a ton.

 

[livebythecreed77]

I think this is a nice to have post launch tbh

 

[honkajoki]

All I wish is that they let us put some workload on the GPU. Paradox games tend to cap CPUs before anything else.

If they found a way to use GPU for some CPU tasks, even so that a powerful GPU would be required, it would be quite a disappointment for those who have built their systems for PDX games emphasizing CPU and ignoring GPU. So hopefully such things would be optional, with the system using whatever's available.

I don't mind if they create flashy graphics that use lots of GPU, as long as the promised flat paper map is there, so it works even on an ancient GPU card or a modern integrated GPU.

 

[gianlucad]

yeah give me fake frames and vaseline over my game, can we also some intel gimmick that makes it so core i9s get fake ticks?

 

[BI0ck]

If they found a way to use GPU for some CPU tasks, even so that a powerful GPU would be required, it would be quite a disappointment for those who have built their systems for PDX games emphasizing CPU and ignoring GPU. So hopefully such things would be optional, with the system using whatever's available.

I don't mind if they create flashy graphics that use lots of GPU, as long as the promised flat paper map is there, so it works even on an ancient GPU card or a modern integrated GPU.

I feel like this is relevant here

 

[Bozkurt]

For most people bottleneck in the game will be from cpu's so dlss or frame gen wouldn't have effect on fps

 

[honkajoki]

I feel like this is relevant here

There's no feature that should not be a game option.

 

[kingsword]

For most people bottleneck in the game will be from cpu's so dlss or frame gen wouldn't have effect on fps

Actually frame generation explicitly is a way to bypass CPU bottleneck. It generates the extra frames on GPU without taxing CPU. Many famously CPU heavy games like Flight Simulator benefits from it.

 

[Brynjar]

Considering the fact that frame generation is notoriously bad at the things you constantly use for decision making (UI numbers) in Paradox games I really don't see the point.

Actually frame generation explicitly is a way to bypass CPU bottleneck. It generates the extra frames on GPU without taxing CPU. Many famously CPU heavy games like Flight Simulator benefits from it.

Whether or not it benefits from it is a matter of personal preferences and hardware. If you consider some artifacts worth the extra FPS it does. If you don't it doesn't. For Paradox games it still wouldn't help people speed through a lategame year even a second faster. Spend that budget on improving actual performance instead. FPS is pretty much a non-issue in Paradox games.

Upscaling would have the opposite effect of what most people want from a Paradox game. It would increase the CPU load and therefore most likely cause some people to enable upscaling, then complain about bad performance (meaning game speed), which in that case would be partly self inflicted. Also, if you have a GPU which can do upscaling you probably don't need upscaling in a Paradox game in the first place.

 

[Sirbab]

Considering the fact that frame generation is notoriously bad at the things you constantly use for decision making (UI numbers) in Paradox games I really don't see the point.


Whether or not it benefits from it is a matter of personal preferences and hardware. If you consider some artifacts worth the extra FPS it does. If you don't it doesn't. For Paradox games it still wouldn't help people speed through a lategame year even a second faster. Spend that budget on improving actual performance instead. FPS is pretty much a non-issue in Paradox games.

Upscaling would have the opposite effect of what most people want from a Paradox game. It would increase the CPU load and therefore most likely cause some people to enable upscaling, then complain about bad performance (meaning game speed), which in that case would be partly self inflicted. Also, if you have a GPU which can do upscaling you probably don't need upscaling in a Paradox game in the first place.

I use it just fine on games like Victoria 3, eu4, and rimworld. At least on lossless scaling it's more than doable.

 

[Brynjar]

It's not really a matter of "letting." Paradox GSGs are performance limited by things that aren't amenable to GPU compute.

Actually, GPUs excel at the kind of things that Paradox games has a lot of: Parallel floating-point arithmetic, but part of the problem is that a few tasks which takes a long time can't be parallelised (each tag needs to be serialised, and the biggest tags tends to take the longest), so the benefit would likely be very limited compared to what you can achive on a modern high-end CPU. From a development point of view it would be a nightmare, and it would likely cause all kinds of problems for people who are running low on VRAM, which would likely be a lot if such a feature was implemented.

 

[Brynjar]

I use it just fine on games like Victoria 3, eu4, and rimworld. At least on lossless scaling it's more than doable.

Of course upscaling is doable. It being doable doesn't mean it is a good idea though. Unless you lock your fps and hit the fps limit even when running the upscaled resolution natively (which would make upscaling pretty pointless) it is physically impossible for it to not harm the simulation speed of the game. Every time a frame is generated, the simulation pauses (see Vic 3 dev diary #76 on performance). Causing the game to pause the simulation to generate frames more often will therefore slow down the percieved simulation speed. It not having a noticable effect to you with your game style and hardware doesn't change that fact.

 

[Sirbab]

Of course upscaling is doable. It being doable doesn't mean it is a good idea though. Unless you lock your fps and hit the fps limit even when running the upscaled resolution natively (which would make upscaling pretty pointless) it is physically impossible for it to not harm the simulation speed of the game. Every time a frame is generated, the simulation pauses (see Vic 3 dev diary #76 on performance). Causing the game to pause the simulation to generate frames more often will therefore slow down the percieved simulation speed. It not having a noticable effect to you with your game style and hardware doesn't change that fact.

So to summarize, you're saying the performance overhead no matter how small is intolerable?
I think that, if that is your argument, is reductive. For one, not all hardware is equally taxed, one can use the gpu for frame Gen rather well on gsgs as they tend not to use the gpu heavily. Also, not all of your current hardware is likely being exploited in existing games; whether due to thread count/multithreading, code bottlenecks, or other ideas there will be some extra to use. I don't claim to be an expert on the topic but I think the fact that I use lossless scaling with nearly every program that doesn't run a perfect 120 hz should be telling for at least one perspective.

Also, the locked frame rate thing seems to be a thing of the past insofar as it being necessary is.

As for the vic 3 comment, I can't really give input there as I'm not a game dev and it isn't strictly relavent to my counter claim as it's an external application, but if this was designed for the game, surely that would be accounted for.

I think the whole conversation is probably moot though, as I give it less than a 5 percent chance for pdx to implement frame Gen natively in their game, and I'll just go back to using lossless scaling when the game runs not well, just like every single one of their games in recent memory in the mid to late game.

 

[kingsword]

Considering the fact that frame generation is notoriously bad at the things you constantly use for decision making (UI numbers) in Paradox games I really don't see the point.


Whether or not it benefits from it is a matter of personal preferences and hardware. If you consider some artifacts worth the extra FPS it does. If you don't it doesn't. For Paradox games it still wouldn't help people speed through a lategame year even a second faster. Spend that budget on improving actual performance instead. FPS is pretty much a non-issue in Paradox games.

Upscaling would have the opposite effect of what most people want from a Paradox game. It would increase the CPU load and therefore most likely cause some people to enable upscaling, then complain about bad performance (meaning game speed), which in that case would be partly self inflicted. Also, if you have a GPU which can do upscaling you probably don't need upscaling in a Paradox game in the first place.

Frame generation's UI issues might arise when the UI element is surrounded by fast-moving scenery like a shooter's aim reticle. Paradox games have their UI elements mostly separate and the fast-moving scenery is practically non-existent so that's a non-issue. So, even Lossless Scaling FG doesn't present that problem when you apply to Paradox games.

That's why we need that as an option. Meaning it's optional on player decision. Game speed is irrelevant to this matter. It's a matter of how smooth the game plays at whatever speed you are on. You might have paused the game and it'll still affect. FPS is pretty much an issue in Paradox games and was further demonstrated for EU5 in preview videos, it ran like a slog. And game development isn't EU sliders, you don't pour uspcaling/framegen implementation budget on 'actual performance' (whatever that is) and suddenly it's faster. Upscaling/framegen is really a no-brainer, lowest effort performance improvement in this age for any 3D game.

You don't run the game magically slower because there's less demand on GPU computation. Game logic will tax whatever the CPU can provide first, after that whatever remains will be diverted to portraying the scene. That's why the frame drops the faster the game runs, game is drawing from CPU all it can to go fast at the expense of graphics. The earliest upscale-capable GPUs are near obsolete now and are near-guaranteed to run EU5 at extremely low frame-rates if they even can.

Like I said in the first message, this discussion really is unnecessary. There should be these options which are common in 2025, then people should decide to enable them or not based on their preferences and needs. It's not really an 'effort' in 2025, even low-budget indie games have them.

 

[honkajoki]

Actually, GPUs excel at the kind of things that Paradox games has a lot of: Parallel floating-point arithmetic, but part of the problem is that a few tasks which takes a long time can't be parallelised (each tag needs to be serialised, and the biggest tags tends to take the longest), so the benefit would likely be very limited compared to what you can achive on a modern high-end CPU. From a development point of view it would be a nightmare, and it would likely cause all kinds of problems for people who are running low on VRAM, which would likely be a lot if such a feature was implemented.

Where would a gsg use floating points? Aren't all the values in such ranges that can be handled as integers (even if adding a decimal dot for UI), and using integers, at least in the CPU, is much faster than using floating points?

 

[Brynjar]

So to summarize, you're saying the performance overhead no matter how small is intolerable?
I think that, if that is your argument, is reductive. For one, not all hardware is equally taxed, one can use the gpu for frame Gen rather well on gsgs as they tend not to use the gpu heavily.

Why on earth would you even want to use upscaling if the game isn't taxing your GPU heavily? The point of using upscaling afaik is to run the game at a lower resolution because it is less taxing for the GPU, and therefore allowing you to run at a higher FPS.

Also, the locked frame rate thing seems to be a thing of the past insofar as it being necessary is.

It is one of the go to solutions to improve game speed in Vic 3. In the Vic 3 benchmark thread people have reported a fairly big impact:

Victoria 3 Performance Benchmark

There's been a lot of discussing Victoria 3's performance. Some people say it runs perfectly smooth the whole way through, others say it's unplayable after X number of years. Presumably the truth is somewhere in the middle. I decided to try and...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Victoria 3 Performance Benchmark

There's been a lot of discussing Victoria 3's performance. Some people say it runs perfectly smooth the whole way through, others say it's unplayable after X number of years. Presumably the truth is somewhere in the middle. I decided to try and...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

As for the vic 3 comment, I can't really give input there as I'm not a game dev and it isn't strictly relavent to my counter claim as it's an external application, but if this was designed for the game, surely that would be accounted for.

The upscaling being done by an extarnal application is completely irrelevant. The problem is that when using upscaling you are reducing the resolution the game runs at.

I think the whole conversation is probably moot though, as I give it less than a 5 percent chance for pdx to implement frame Gen natively in their game, and I'll just go back to using lossless scaling when the game runs not well, just like every single one of their games in recent memory in the mid to late game.

The real performance issue in Paradox games is the simulation speed, not fps. Them implementing native frame generation and/or upscaling won't do anything to improve that.

Frame generation's UI issues might arise when the UI element is surrounded by fast-moving scenery like a shooter's aim reticle.

No. The primary problem is predicting what the numbers should be. Separating the UI from the rest of the frame generation could potentially address that issue for Paradox games, but from what I understand Nvidia's frame generation does not allow to not generate UI elements as of today. Paradox could of course go for AMD and Intel frame generation support only, but that would probably cause a bigger uproar than just not supporting frame generation.

FPS is pretty much an issue in Paradox games and was further demonstrated for EU5 in preview videos, it ran like a slog.

The primary performance issue in all Paradox games is the game speed, not FPS.

You don't run the game magically slower because there's less demand on GPU computation. Game logic will tax whatever the CPU can provide first, after that whatever remains will be diverted to portraying the scene. That's why the frame drops the faster the game runs, game is drawing from CPU all it can to go fast at the expense of graphics.

That's not how things work, but there is nothing magical about it. I would suggest reading this old Vic 3 dev diary for some enlightenment:

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #76 - Performance

Hello and welcome to this week's Victoria 3 dev diary. This time we will be talking a bit about performance and how the game works under the hood. It will get somewhat detailed along the way and if you are mostly interested in what has improved...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Considering the fact that EUV basically runs on the same engine, and the fact that there is no good way around the cause of the issue, there is no way EUV will not have some of the same challanges when it comes to FPS and simulation speed.

Where would a gsg use floating points? Aren't all the values in such ranges that can be handled as integers (even if adding a decimal dot for UI), and using integers, at least in the CPU, is much faster than using floating points?

Fair point.