Need a frame rate boost? Maybe you should be gaming at 128x72 resolution
Ever wonder how Days Gone would look at 72p? As cutting edge gaming hardware strives for sky-high resolutions like 8K and beyond, it's always fun to take a step back and appreciate the ugly beauty of extreme downscaling using old hardware.
YouTuber RandomGaminginHD (via SWEClockers) grabbed some older GPUs (an AMD Radeon HD6450 circa 2011 and Nvidia Geforce GT 710, which came out 2014) and ran a fun experiment: How will games run at 720p, and how will they run at one-tenth of that? The results were interesting.
Seeing modern games run at offensively low resolutions always puts a smile on my face as it reminds me of how things used to be and how far graphics have come in PC gaming. It's why I love seeing channels like this and LowSpecGamer take on these fun projects.
Fortnite got a decent frame rate hike running at 72p instead of 720p, with the game hitting over 50 fps on both of these ancient GPUs. GTA 5 also put in a good show, hitting 25-35 fps. Playable? That's really up to what your eyes can handle. I don't see anyone attempting to play any of these games like this for more than a few minutes at a time before suffering a low-pixel count-induced migraine.
Days Gone and Cyberpunk, meanwhile, are a bit too much for these ancient graphics cards, with both games struggling to escape the low teens. But it's not like these games were running well on these elder $65 GPUs, to begin with.
Now, 128x72 pixels aren't going to show up in video settings; you have to dive into the configuration files for the games in question to make the necessary changes—just in case you were planning on running GTA 5 in Bronze Age mode (the video goes into detail). Note that doing this could result in the game (and possibly your eyes) crashing.