Zombie Army 4: Dead War PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide
Resolution Scaling – The Best Way to Boost your GPU performance?
Running games at a 4K resolution is a challenging task. All modern graphics cards are stretched to their limits at 4K, with even £1000 graphics cards like Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti finding 4K 60FPS framerates challenging when playing modern games at their highest settings.
Resolution Scaling has proven to be a popular performance tweaking tool in many modern console releases, bringing 900p images to 1080p screens or resolutions like 1440p or 1800p to 4K on revamped consoles like the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. Now, these options are becoming commonplace on PC, allowing gamers to free up some additional resources to run their game on 4K screens on more budget-friendly hardware.
With our PowerColor RX 570 Red Devil, we tested Zombie Army 4: Dead War with 100% (native 4K/2160p), 90% (1944p scaled to 4K) and 80% (1728p scaled to 4K) resolution scales. These changes yielded performance gains of around 11.2% and 30.4% respectively, when looking at Zombie Army 4’s average framerates.
Like before, we have used in-game performance results instead of Zombie Army 4’s built-in benchmark.
Below is a comparison of a section of a 4K screenshot which compares Zombie Army 4 with a 100% resolution Scale and an 80% resolution scale. The images below are 800×450 sections of 4K screenshots.
Notice how the 80% scaled image is noticeably blurred when compared to the true 4K image. When using a small 4K monitor or when sitting far away from a 4K television, the difference between these two images is more challenging to spot. The comparison below amplifies the severity of the game’s quality loss when using an 80% resolution scale.
