I just tested it with UHD (EGP) enabled and it does indeed make a huge difference. Much less zoom out available, too much zoom in. It should be around the same of course. But too much zoom out is not nice either so this should be balanced approximately the same in both modes.
The UHD texture pack contains double resolution sprites, this is intended to make the scaling for UHD screens (4k+) look a bit more sensible.
The end result is that if you get the UHD textures on a 1080p screen you will effectively have less zoom range because all the sprites will take up more screen space.
So there are no new or changed graphics in the UHD pack, they are just bigger (and take up more memory which can be a performance hit for some systems). Some people like them even for 1080p screens and that’s totally fine as well.
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Right on! Thanks for the clarification, Neros 
But why can’t the zoom range be automatically changed when UHD textures are used, so that player can zoom farther out?
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We did try to fix that at one point, but it wasn’t stable enough to release and we haven’t had time to go back to it yet.
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The big question here would be… are there plans to get to arranging it for 1080p monitors? being able to zoom in on the new graphics is what every aoe2 player has always wanted.
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You are perfectly right and I hope that Microsoft can help.
How would this help 1080p monitor users? With Neros7000 saying the enhanced graphics pack is for UHD 4K+ users, I’m genuinely curious how it would or could benefit 1080p users, like me. Thanks!
Well you can zoom in so much that you can check if your villagers have dressed underwear that day, now seriously, zooming level is not the same, the detail of the game while max zoom in with EGP DLC @1080 is stunning.
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Well, if you try zooming in while using UHD units look much closer and better, whilst withouth UHD, you don’t get that level of zoom and graphics are worse up close.
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Even something like the nicer water effects with EGP would be a shame to lose if I disabled it, but I can’t play this zoomed in 
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Microsoft, please let us zoom out even more on UHD graphics! I love how UHD looks on my 1920x1080 screen but it’s too zoomed in to be competitive in the game.
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There is a related issue to this, which is that the game doesn’t support AMD virtual resolution. I have my 1080p screen set to 4k in the AMD driver, and in all other games, the game sees my screen as 4k, and lets me run at 4k, with the driver downsampling to 1080p. This generally produces a very noticeable improvement in image quality compared to running at 1080p. But for some reason, AoE II DE doesn’t see the screen as being 4k, and the highest resolution it lets me set is 1080p, causing the zoom problem with enhanced graphics. If the virtual resolution worked, it would provide a workaround for the zoom issue for people with a powerful enough graphics card to handle 4k.
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Thanks for mentioning it. I’ll try this approach myself. Maybe I find a way around.
So… I just bought this shiny new 1080p monitor. I guess I could switch it for a 4k
But, does anyone know for sure if UHDzooms out to normal view on 4K?
I kind of don’t trust MS to, you know, give a crap about whether things work…
From another thread, these all give the same view of the map:
1080p, non-enhanced, 100% zoom. Benchmark score 1229
1440p, non-enhanced, 50% zoom. Benchmark score 1229
2160p, enhanced, 75% zoom. Benchmark score 1179
IMO 1440p non-enhanced is the sweet spot for competitive use, as it avoids the performance hit of using enhanced, while giving good ability to zoom out. A 4k screen with enhanced both reduces performance and gives less ability to zoom out than 1440p non-enhanced.
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Thank you so much! Very helpful!
by any means do you know if with a 27’ monitor (1440p) i would get same results ? (4k monitor x 1080p monitor)
cheers and tnx in advance
From one of my old posts:
Using UHD graphics, every length is twice the original amount of pixels, meaning at 1:1 pixel zoom (which the AoE2DE rendering engine handles in a special way), 1920x1080 is the equivalent of 960x540, and 2560x1440 is effectively 1280x720, not accounting for screen estates taken up by UI.
Under the original AoE2, the default resolutions, and their actual fields-of-view without UI were:
800x600: 800x430
1024x768: 1024x568
[1366x768: 1366x568]
1280x1024: 1280x774
(1366x768 was the actual target resolution of AoE2HD’s UI assets.)
It’s easy to see that 960x540 would give you a FOV that’s below even the original 1024x568, while 1280x720 is slightly below 1280x774 (narrower by slightly more than a tile), and well above 1366x568.
TL;DR: Your UHD mode FOV on a 1440p monitor is larger than playing AoE2HD on a 1366x768 netbook, which is quite decent for AoE2.
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Screenshot captured at 1440p, auto-resized by forum software to 1080p:
As you can see, unless you are totally spoiled by playing older versions of AoE2 on 1080p and absolutely can’t go back, 1440p with 2x (“UHD”) graphics gives you a decent-sized viewport, while allowing you to see all the sprites’ details. For me, this is the best possible way to play AoE2DE given current hardware in the real world.
OTOH, the pros seem to play AoE2DE on a 1920x1080 monitor with 1x graphics. (Arguably the devs should have designated something like this to be the “competition-standard” FOV, and force its use in serious competitions at least—if not all ranked games—to ensure fairness, as StarCraft 2 had done. But that hasn’t happened.)
In the end, which choice is best for you is a matter of personal preference.
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Hi Fire. Could you clarify what you mean by “4k monitor x 1080p monitor”? Usually a “1080p monitor” refers to a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (width by height), and a 4k monitor refers to a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels.
But maybe this will answer your question anyway. The amount you can see depends on two factors:
- Whether or not you use the UHD enhanced graphics.
- Your monitor’s resolution.
The size of your monitor (24", 27", etc) doesn’t determine how far you can zoom in or out. The resolution determines the number of pixels, then the size of your monitor determines the size of the pixels. A 24" 4K monitor can see more of the map at once than a 32" 1080p monitor.
Every unit’s image has a fixed number of pixels. For example, let’s pretend a Knight is 100 pixels by 100 pixels. Then a 1080p monitor would be able to display just over 10 Knights from top to bottom. That’s 1080 pixels divided by the 100 pixel size of the Knight. And a 4K monitor (3840 x 2160) would be able to display just over 21 Knights from top to bottom. These Knights will appear bigger or smaller depending on the size of your monitor, but the resolution determines how many of them you see.
Then, if you turn on the UHD graphics, those files would be twice the size at 200 by 200. So you’d fit only 5 Knights at 1080p and 10 Knights at 4K, but these images would be higher resolution with more details.
You can zoom in and out in game, but the min and max zoom levels are still determined by your desktop resolution.
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