What would it take to duplicate a video signal at two different resolution? For instance, have a game display 1920 x 1080 in 16:9 on first monitor, while 1440 x 1080 in 4:3 on the second monitor without any scaling.
I understand currently it isn’t possible, but is this something that could be added as a feature in the drivers, or is there something that would be required from the hardware, operating system, game engine, etc. for it to be possible?
The reason why you’d want something like this, is to be able to play in a resolution you’re comfortable with, while at the same time record in a resolution that suits whatever service you use, without the need to rescale it.
Funnily enough, I came to this forum to ask almost exactly the same question. I don’t see how you’d achieve this without any scaling, however. Surely duplicating e.g. a 4K signal to a second monitor at 1080p would require the 4K image to be scaled down to 1080p?
I would definitely like to see this feature in the drivers, though. It must be achievable, surely, with all the recent development on the GameStream API?
Also UltraMon software can do this, but doesn’t use the GPU so performance is terrible.
I’m not really tech-savvy to answer it properly, so how I imagine it would work is most likely out of touch to how things actually work. However, the way I see it working is you render it twice as two different video signals, and if that’s possible, I’d imagine it would require support from the applications, game engines and so forth, which I believe could be streamlined through an API.
If it were possible, it would be pretty strenuous, but hopefully you could use a streaming PC to alleviate some of the resource hog it would produce.
The issue I have with scaling is aspect ratio and field of view, which would either make objects wide or narrow in comparison to its native resolution (e.g. 1440 x 1080 in 4:3 vs. 1920 x 1080 in 16:9), especially if the field of view is locked to aspect ratios.
I would certainly have scaling than nothing; that’s for sure.
Ah, I see what you want to achieve. I’m not a (games) developer so I can’t say exactly what’s possible but I think you’d need a very specialized setup to achieve what you want. You basically want to re-render everything that happens on-screen at a different resolution so that the “cloned” image (which isn’t really a clone any more) doesn’t become distorted?
It might be possible to do with certain applications like video, where the content can simply be resized. But anything dynamic like dialog windows, icons or 3D games would surely be very difficult. You’d run into issues with re-flowing text, icons or GUIs – as an extreme example, imagine trying to duplicate how a website looks from a 1080p monitor on to a 320px wide smartphone screen. Mouse movement would also need to (somehow) be scaled down.
What I hoped to achieve is simply straight duplication of the primary monitor, scaled down to a lower resolution for the secondary monitor (even if it looks stretched/skewed).