Forums » Help » Does the scale factor affect the performance?

Hello there
I was wondering if there is any difference between specifying a resolution of 160x160 pixels and a scale factor of 2 and specifiying a resolution of 320x320 px with a scale factor of 1.
Thanks in advance

Scaling is done at load time so there should be little difference in performance once the game is loaded.

In other words the game is always running at a scale factor of 1... it's just using graphics that have been scaled. This also means that scale factor of 1 will load faster but not perform any better.

Ok, thank you

Just thought I'd mention, I seem to notice a performance drop when I scale up. What Graphikos says may be completely correct, however my experience with 3x scale seems to have been slower than with 1x or 2x...

Well, I'd say the over-all size of the canvas would effect performance. A 2x running at 320x240 is going to perform better than a 2x running at 640x480. There is simply less area that has to be drawn. So if scaling up is making the canvas size larger, that is probably the reason for the performance drop.

There is also the argument that larger assets (the final size, after scaling) might take more processing for canvas to manipulate it therefore lowering performance. I'd probably assume to be this true but not sure without really benchmarking it. A 1x scale asset of the same final size would have the same performance drop though.

Bottom line is scaling is as efficient as the engine can make it by scaling it at load-time (and pre-rendering) vs trying to do it real-time. Anything else is a different issue.