Does the resolution of display affect the speed of real time rendering?

[Higuchi]

I'm considering whether I upgrade my 2K display (1920x1080) to 4K display (3840x2160). Although, I usually use 900x900 resolution on real time rendering view on Keyshot, I'm sometimes feeling the lack of resolution to confirm how well the final rendering would be through the thumbnail of real time rendering view.

In this case, if I extend it to for example 1800x1800, does the speed of real time rendering become slower? If not, I'm going to buy new one with high spec graphic board.

Thank you,

[andy.engelkemier]

Yes, it is slower.
For this reason, I wish they allowed us to set a resolution, but also a zoom level sort of like it does with UI stuff. If you're working on a 4K monitor, it's nice to have the preview big, but not have it set as 1900 pixels tall. If you're scene isn't that complicated then you won't notice a difference. But if you're doing something like interiors (like I've seen you doing) then it will be quite noticeable.
But sometimes you'll want to preview the whole thing, so you can see as much detail as possible.
It would be nice to be able to bounce back and forth without having to do something like change the resolution of your monitor, which would really limit you to 50% increments anyway.

Anyway, so yes, a higher resolution monitor will make the real-time window slower. It won't effect your final render time though.

[mattjgerard]

there are some somewhat kludgy workarounds for this sort of thing, you can lock the preview window size in the Image tab, but that doesn't provide for a quick switch between two settings. You can also set up Workspaces with different preview window sizes setup with tabs and pallets taking up space. it will chage your working layout, but again, its a workaround. You can also use the Render Region tool and just leave it to a smaller size. That will allow you to work in a certina area of the image, but its essentially cropping in the image, so you won't be seeing your whole setup. I use this all the time to just get one corner of a shiny object to look right, then move to another LED light under a cloudy plastic that takes forever to resolve, then I'll turn it off, let the whole scene upres and go get a cup of coffee while it bakes.

The more pixels it has to render the slower it goes. Not any perfect solutions, but many ways to work around it. I've got a 2.,5k monitor and I can't imaging going back to a 1080.

[Eric Summers]

I have a 4K monitor, so when I have 'Render in High DPI' enabled my real time view is 1856px tall. However, most of the time I work with Render in High DPI off, so my real time view is 928px tall. I only turn it on when I need to get a more detailed look at my work, like before a final render as you mentioned.

[andy.engelkemier]

But locking the resolution make it tiny on a high resolution monitor, so isn't really a great solution.
A better solution would be to allow the user to specify a number to zoom. So say you have an 1339x2048 area available to you, and you have a square image aspect ratio. You could choose to zoom to 200% and it would display 1339x1339, but show you 669x669 actually rendered pixels. This way, the graphics card isn't pushing so much around, but you don't have to put your face 8 inches from the screen to actually see what you're doing.

It's a similar idea to what I had suggested a while ago where they could allow the user to set a final render resolution, then in the viewport show the camera at full resolution, cropped to the window. That would be Incredibly useful when adjusting the size of textures since sometimes you have to balance just a little bit between reality and what you, or someone else, wants to see. Brushed stainless is a great example of that. Some marketing people Insist on seeing grain. But you know quite well standing back from your dishwasher, you see no grain. You take a picture and you get no grain. You just know it's stainless because of the anisotropic effect of the reflections. I've even gone as far as using a photo masked where the metal would be and still got "It just doesn't look like stainless unless you see grain." So it's really nice to be able to see the render in the final resolution when adjusting it so you can Juuuuust barely see the texture that someone insists on seeing.

[Higuchi]

Yes, it is slower.
For this reason, I wish they allowed us to set a resolution, but also a zoom level sort of like it does with UI stuff. If you're working on a 4K monitor, it's nice to have the preview big, but not have it set as 1900 pixels tall. If you're scene isn't that complicated then you won't notice a difference. But if you're doing something like interiors (like I've seen you doing) then it will be quite noticeable.
But sometimes you'll want to preview the whole thing, so you can see as much detail as possible.
It would be nice to be able to bounce back and forth without having to do something like change the resolution of your monitor, which would really limit you to 50% increments anyway.

Anyway, so yes, a higher resolution monitor will make the real-time window slower. It won't effect your final render time though.

I'm with you! What I want is the zoom function only when I need on the preview. Specifically, when I make interior scene, I need to confirm some details many times. But, it's not always, it's only for that case. So, usually I want to prioritize the speed of real time view.

[Higuchi]

there are some somewhat kludgy workarounds for this sort of thing, you can lock the preview window size in the Image tab, but that doesn't provide for a quick switch between two settings. You can also set up Workspaces with different preview window sizes setup with tabs and pallets taking up space. it will chage your working layout, but again, its a workaround. You can also use the Render Region tool and just leave it to a smaller size. That will allow you to work in a certina area of the image, but its essentially cropping in the image, so you won't be seeing your whole setup. I use this all the time to just get one corner of a shiny object to look right, then move to another LED light under a cloudy plastic that takes forever to resolve, then I'll turn it off, let the whole scene upres and go get a cup of coffee while it bakes.

The more pixels it has to render the slower it goes. Not any perfect solutions, but many ways to work around it. I've got a 2.,5k monitor and I can't imaging going back to a 1080.

That is exactly my another proposal! As you mentioned, it's impossible to register different resolutions on each image tabs. I hope we will be able to embed resolution as we like on image tabs. If it will be realized, we can quickly render different ratios of resolution, 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, etc.

It might not be related to my original topic.

[Higuchi]

I have a 4K monitor, so when I have 'Render in High DPI' enabled my real time view is 1856px tall. However, most of the time I work with Render in High DPI off, so my real time view is 928px tall. I only turn it on when I need to get a more detailed look at my work, like before a final render as you mentioned.

Thank you for your helpful comment!
Could you tell me more details about "High DPI Support"? I've known this command, but I can't understand it through the simple manual below. Does it make sense only for 4K or more higher? I wonder if my 2K display is affected by this command, and what benefit it is.
https://manual.keyshot.com/manual/preferences/interface-preferences/

[mattjgerard]

I have a 4K monitor, so when I have 'Render in High DPI' enabled my real time view is 1856px tall. However, most of the time I work with Render in High DPI off, so my real time view is 928px tall. I only turn it on when I need to get a more detailed look at my work, like before a final render as you mentioned.

your 2k display won't use the high dpi rendering preference. mine is a 2.5k display and it doesn't make a difference. in the displacys where it does, it just renders a lot more pixels and the preview image will look sharper


Thank you for your helpful comment!
Could you tell me more details about "High DPI Support"? I've known this command, but I can't understand it through the simple manual below. Does it make sense only for 4K or more higher? I wonder if my 2K display is affected by this command, and what benefit it is.
https://manual.keyshot.com/manual/preferences/interface-preferences/

[Higuchi]

Hi there again,

I'm end up buying 4K monitor, and I'm able to totally understand what all of you mentioned! Now, I adjusted 150% zoom by windows setting, since 100% is too small to use any applications on 4K. And, I basically set 900x900 pixel for real time view on Keyshot. In this case, does my GPU render 900x900 or 1,350x1,350 (150% higher)? Even if 900x900 is shown on resolution tab, hopefully I want 100% scale image (1,350x1,350) is rendered and shown on the display. Does it depend on the very 'Render in High DPI' setting?

[Sid Hatrack]

I was considering a 4k monitor but after watching this video I am reconsidering, because it seems apps, dialog boxes and remote desktop can scale differently depending what resolution they were written for so you don't know how they will display on 4k monitor. I don't want to have to adjust my resolution to accommodate different apps. Plus, you need a card that can deliver 8 million pixels to the monitor compared to 2 million.

I do mostly CAD, no gaming, so the LG 34" ultra wide curved monitor looks like it would be adequate for my need.

[robertvincent]

Maybe there could be some problem, while they run together.

[Higuchi]

Thank you for some references.

I could understand negative point for 4K monitor through really using it. First of all, in general, any applications specifically for smart phone app are firstly based on resolution where many people are using. Namely, some well designed apps can change its appearance depending on different resolution.

But, windows OS and related applications including Keyshot cannot adjust their appearance even if we use 2K or 4K. So, only thing that we can do is to scale entirety, commonly used as 150%. As fa as I understand, this is a radical issue about this matter. Hopefully, applications have to properly adjust to the number of resolution of monitor, don't they?

[andy.engelkemier]

Windows applications Can adjust their appearance if we use 2k, 4k, or anything in between. And the guy in the video did touch on it. Windows scaling is really just that, it's meant to help scale. If you've got a 40inch monitor and you're only 32 inches from it then you'll probably have windows scaling set to 100% and you won't experience any problems other than a pain in your neck. Developers still have to design it correctly to make use of that. For many, it's a complete UI rewrite. For others, they designed their software to scale on it's own. Another aspect that they usually fail to do is understand that people may have 2 monitors at different scales, which is the worst of the problems. Early in the video he said you have to define something as a certain number of pixels, which is not true. That's how programmers did it at one time, just like web developers. And you still can, but there are other ways. Good web design has moved to responsive design. You can get the user's resolution, and do everything by percentage as well. And several ways between those. But what resolution doesn't actually tell the user is scale. That's kind of where windows scaling comes in.

Windows scaling (this is also an issue on mac btw) is not perfect for sure. I have a 4k tv/monitor at home serving dual purpose since my home office is my guest room. It's 32 inches and is about 30-34 inches from my head, depending on how i'm standing/sitting. (btw, if you have a 30" desktop, anything more than 32" will probably be too big, in my opinion)  My 14inch laptop screen is about 20inches from my face during ideal use. My larger monitor, my main monitor for sure, is set to 150% scaling. My tiny laptop is set to 200%, and it's even closer to me than my big monitor.

Also, setting your monitor to 1080 on a 4K monitor isn't any more "blurry" than just using a 1080 monitor. I haven't tested it, because I personally don't think it's That big of a deal to have some stupid dialog pop up really big or small enough that I have to lean in to read it. But you Can change an application to run as if your monitor was 1920x1080 instead using compatibility mode. Of course, if it has popup windows that run as a separate process or something, then it probably won't work. Just like some of the windows in keyshot can be moved with Alt+Space then 'M', but others, if they open up offscreen, you can't move it without changing scaling or resolution, or killing your preferences, which always sucks. But are those popups really a majority of your work? No. So it's really not a deal breaker, it's just an annoyance.

The other thing is the scaling is more of a function of the size of your monitor(s) than 4k. If I have two 1080 monitors, one being 14inch, and one being 32 inch, where they are approximately the same distance from my head, I will still want to use scaling.

If you do other work, like editing videos, or editing images, then 4K has quite a few advantages. If all you do is solidworks, fine, probably not a big deal. And real-time rendering is always going to be slower at a high resolution. And every time we get better hardware, we tend to throw a bit extra at it. This is why I would Love to have more control than just a checkbox for high-dpi to scale the rendering size, and also have to Restart!? Bleh.

So external software solution to that? Performance mode is great, although it sucks there isn't one for GPU. So if you're using that, you need to save your current settings as a preset, then switch to a preset where you create your own "performance mode". Then you can switch back. But that doesn't work great for all material types. So you can, instead, work at a really small resolution. So say you always set it to something like 600px wide. I'm hoping there is a better software solution out there, but you can hit Windows+"+" to bring up the built in windows magnifier. Switch to docked (here's the first annoyance). Pull that down to the center of the window to make it windowed. Why don't they have a "windowed" option? I don't know, but docked is the option with the windowed option.
Here's the tricky part, move the magnifier window out of the way, and move the settings window on top of keyshot with that setup. Then uncheck All the options for "have the magnifier follow:" The "follow mouse" option is key there. I hadn't found a way to pan if you turn them all off. Now you can move the magnifier window back overtop of where the keyshot screen is. Adjust the scale so that the render area mostly fills it and you've successfully "scaled up" JUST the render area. So your card doesn't have to work on all those pixels, and you can just turn that on/off by Windows++/-.

If anyone knows more convenient software to do this, I'd be interested. It would be really cool if keyshot built that functionality in, but my guess is it's not all that easy since them doing it to 200% takes a restart.
Now you can move the