Garry’s Mod – How to Take High-Resolution Screenshots

مقدمة

If you like to make GMod posters, you may have run into a desire to take higher-res screenshots than your monitor supports. على سبيل المثال, I’m stuck with a 1080p monitor, which can mean that small details in posters can be difficult to see sometimes.

The common advice you hear for this is to use the “poster” يأمر. على سبيل المثال, “poster 2” will create a screenshot with 2x the horizontal and vertical resolution (e.g. 1920×1080 -> 3840×2160). للأسف, this method can cause some nasty visual artifacts. To demonstrate, here’s a comparison, with the same basic shot taken with multiple settings. كما ترون, the second pic looks awful – the water reflection is totally broken, and there’s a clear seam where the image was stitched together.

لكن, the album also contains a third image – a proper 4k screenshot with none of these artifacts, استخدام “supersampling”. What exactly is this, and how can it help us?

Supersampling

Supersampling involves rendering the game at a higher resolution than your monitor normally allows, and then scaling it down afterward. It’s normally used as an anti-aliasing strategy (the additional pixels allow a smoother image to be created), لكن you can also take advantage of that higher resolution for your screenshots.

It turns out that graphics drivers have built-in ways to enable supersampling. Here are instructions on how to enable it for both Nvidia and AMD cards. If you already know this stuff, feel free to skip to the “What to do with supersampling” قسم.

Enabling supersampling with Nvidia

Nvidia’s supersampling feature is called Dynamic Super Resolution, or DSR.

1. يفتح Nvidia Control Panel. You should be able to find it in the Start menu.
2. Navigate to the Manage 3D settings قائمة طعام, underneath the “3D Settings” header on the left.
3. Make sure you’re in the Global Settings فاتورة غير مدفوعة, rather than the Program Settings tab. (Don’t worry that the setting is global – this will just enable additional resolution options in your games, it shouldn’t affect anything by default.)
4. Scroll down to the DSR – Factors setting and select it.
5. Underneath the Legacy scaling قسم, check off the resolutions you wish to enable, ثم انقر OK. (ملحوظة, this is based on the pixel count and not the scale factor, so 4.00x is actually just double width and height.)
6. أخيراً, انقر Apply at the bottom to actually save your changes.

And you’re done! You can proceed to the “What to do with supersampling” قسم.

Enabling supersampling with AMD

AAMD’s supersampling feature is called Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR.

ملحوظة: I don’t have an AMD card myself, so these instructions come straight from this article. If someone wants to confirm that these steps are correct, that’d be much appreciated.

1. يفتح AMD Radeon Software.
2. Click the gear icon in the upper right, وحدد Display فاتورة غير مدفوعة.
3. Turn the Virtual Super Resolution setting on. This will enable all supported supersampling resolution options in-game.

Image credit Alan Bradley, via PCMag

What to do with supersampling

So now you have supersampling enabled, but how do you use it? It’s simple: once you’re in-game, just go to خيارات > Video and check out the resolution settings. If you’ve done everything right, you should see new option(ق) that let you use higher than native resolution.

Once you’re using the higher resolution, all you need to do is use the poster 1 يأمر (لا poster 2, just 1), or take a screenshot in some other way, and bam – you’ve got yourself a pic with as high a res as possible, and none of those ugly stitching artifacts!

There are a couple caveats worth mentioning, لكن:

• GMod doesn’t have any UI scaling, so the UI will only show up at half scale and make things very difficult to use. I’d recommend only switching for the moment you’re ready to take the final shot. ال “mat_setvideomode” يأمر (described below) can help a little with this.
• هذا does not work properly with borderless window. You’ll only be able to see the top left corner of the screen. You need to use proper fullscreen mode if you want to see the whole game (although the “poster” command will still work fine regardless).

Shortcut command to change resolution

mat_setvideomode is a console command that simply changes the resolution and display mode settings. It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s a very nice convenience, since you can bind it to a key and it skips having to navigate the menus (which can be difficult while you’re set to a higher res).

The syntax is:

mat_setvideomode [w] [ح] [mode]

where w is width, ح is height, و mode is either 0 for fullscreen, 1 for windowed, أو 2 for borderless windowed.

As an example, I currently have one key bound to mat_setvideomode 3840 2160 0, to set 4k resolution and fullscreen mode; and another key bound to mat_setvideomode 1920 1080 2, to return to normal 1080p resolution and borderless windowed mode.

ضع في اعتبارك, لكن, that this doesn’t let you skip turning on supersampling in your graphics driver settings. If you give the command an invalid resolution (anything that wouldn’t normally appear in the settings menu) it will just default to 640×480 بدلاً من. So it really is just a convenience, nothing more.