What is downsampling?

Downsampling is a beautifully simple concept made ugly by the fearsome numbers involved. Really, though, it’s no different to supersampling AA, a popular feature of all modern videocards. Anyone who’s used an image editor like Photoshop, watched a video file on PC or had to scale down Doom or Quake to postage stamp proportions will know it well. If you want to make a picture look better, all you have to do is shrink it.

Just like supersampling, downsampling involves running a game at double, triple or even four times your desired resolution and then crushing it down to size. The results are invariably superb, the performance hit not always as bad as you expect. This is one of those rare times when a powerful graphics card is entirely free to deliver.

The catch is the relationship between that card and the monitor it’s attached to. Very few will let you exceed a monitor’s native resolution at the driver level, which is where such downsampling fails. Done at the engine level, though, by the handful of games that actually let you do it, any PC with the horsepower should be capable. Fuel just happens to be one of those games.

Downsampling in Fuel

I say ‘should be capable’ because I’ve only tried this on my PC, and it’s such an unorthodox method that I can’t make any assumptions. It’s not a perfect method, either, as it means running the game in a window. Match the window size to your screen resolution, though, and it’s near-as-dammit fullscreen. Beggars can’t be choosers, unfortunately.

Step 1: Get Fuel running in a window

Whether you’re using a disc-based or Steam install, the first step is to get Fuel running in a window. It couldn’t be much simpler. Open your Fuel installation folder, which could be either:

<drive letter>\Steam\steamapps\common\fuel

or

<drive letter>Program Files\Codemasters\Fuel

Now, create a shortcut for the file ‘SecuLauncher.exe’. Note that we’re not using the more obvious Fuel.exe. In the target field of the shortcut, add the parameter ‘-W’ (without the parenthesis) to the end, giving you something like this:

<drive letter>\Steam\steamapps\common\fuel\SecuLauncher.exe -W

Step 2: Customise the game’s resolution

As you’d expect, you can’t just set some ridiculous resolution via the game’s option screens. You can, though, do it via the Windows registry. Open regedit and browse to the following:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FUEL

Now we’re going to edit the ‘VideoResolution’ key, which just to make things awkward is a hex value. To make things simple, I’ve calculated some common resolutions and their supersampled values for you. I’m only going as high as 2×2 supersampling here as there’s meagre improvement with 4×4 at the cost of a large performance hit. Replace the value, then, with whichever of these (just the seven digit value) suits your native resolution:

5A00A00 - 720p (1280x720, rendered at 2560x1440)

8340D20 - (1680x1050, rendered at 3360x2100)

8700f00 - 1080p (1920x1080, rendered at 3840x2160)

Obviously, there are several popular resolutions not listed here, so here’s how you work them out for yourself. Taking the 1080p value above as an example, the hex value breaks down as follows (without spaces, of course):

870 [the doubled vertical resolution] 0 [padding - use only if the vertical resolution is three characters rather than four] f00 [the doubled horizontal resolution]

You can calculate the hex values themselves using this tool or similar.

Step 3: Run the game

And that’s that! The first thing you’ll notice, other than the window, is that the game’s frontend remains correctly scaled but for a few (now miniature) fonts and a shrunken GFWL interface. That’s your sign that the method’s worked. You can now enjoy Fuel as it was meant to be seen.