UHD Graphics too zoomed in

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.

====

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:

  1. Whether or not you use the UHD enhanced graphics.
  2. 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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