Comment by layer8
14 hours ago
Except that the hardware doesn’t necessarily offer perfect integer scaling. Oftentimes, it only provides blurry interpolation that looks less sharp than a corresponding native-resolution display.
14 hours ago
Except that the hardware doesn’t necessarily offer perfect integer scaling. Oftentimes, it only provides blurry interpolation that looks less sharp than a corresponding native-resolution display.
The monitor may or may not offer perfect scaling, but at least on Windows the GPU drivers can do it on their side so the monitor receives a native resolution signal that's already pixel doubled correctly.
Most modern games already have built-in scaling options. You can set the game to run at your screen’s native resolution but have it do the rendering at a different scale factor. Good games can even render the HUD at native resolution and the graphics at a scaled resolution.
Modern OSes also scale fine.
It’s really not an issue.
Games are not what I had in mind. Last time I checked, most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling (i.e. nearest-neighbor, no interpolation).
> most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling
https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en...
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-0...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
I don't know what the situation is on Mac and Linux, but all of the Windows drivers offer it.
With very high PPI displays the gamma corrected interpolation scaling is far better than nearest neighbor scaling.
The idea is to make the pixels so small that your eyes aren’t resolving individual pixels anyway. Interpolation appears correct to your eyes because you’re viewing it through a low-pass filter (the physical limit of your eyes) anyway.
Reverting to nearest neighbor at high PPI would introduce new artifacts because the aliasing effects would create unpleasant and unnatural frequencies in the image.
Most modern GPU drivers (nVidia in particular) will do fixed multiple scaling if that’s what you want. Nearest neighbor is not good though.