How this calculator works
A resolution scale is a percentage of the native pixel count along each axis. Fifty percent means each side is halved, so the frame holds one quarter of the original pixels, not one half. That quadratic relationship matters for rendering budgets and file sizes: cutting the side length to 70 percent leaves 49 percent of the pixels. This page rounds each scaled side to a whole number of pixels, which is what a renderer must do, and reports the percentage of the pixel dimensions rather than the percentage of the pixel area. The table lists the scale factors commonly offered by game engines and video editors.
Formula
scaled width = original width x scale. scaled height = original height x scale. scale = scaled width / original width. scaled pixels = scaled width x scaled height. Because both sides scale, the pixel count scales by the square of the factor.
Worked example
A 1920 by 1080 frame at 50 percent becomes 960 by 540 pixels, which is 518,400 pixels against the original 2,073,600. At 150 percent it becomes 2880 by 1620 pixels, or 4,665,600 pixels. Reversing the first case, a 960 pixel wide copy of a 1920 pixel frame gives a scale of 960 / 1920 = 0.5, or 50 percent.
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Frequently asked questions
Why does the pixel count fall faster than the percentage?
Both the width and the height are multiplied by the scale, so the area is multiplied by the scale twice. At 50 percent you keep half the width and half the height, which is a quarter of the pixels.
What do 33 and 66 percent mean?
They are rounded thirds. A true third of the width is 640 pixels at 1920, which is 33.333 percent, and two thirds is 1280 pixels, which is 66.667 percent. The common 33 and 66 labels are rounded for convenience.
Does scaling change the field of view?
In a renderer, a resolution scale usually changes detail only: the same scene is drawn with fewer samples. If the scale also changes the projection, the field of view and framing change too, so check the renderer documentation.
Can I upscale beyond 100 percent?
Yes, and this page allows it. Upscaling adds no real detail unless the source had more information; it only makes each source pixel larger, though some renderers combine it with temporal accumulation to recover sharpness.