Petition for non-blurry GPU-based scaling

[DerailedOmegaMale]

To moderators: Please consider not banning me for this. It's not like I'm spamming 24/7.

To everyone:
Are you tired of KS (and maybe some other low-res games as well) being blurry when you play it in full screen on big monitors? There is an online petition going on with the goal of convincing the major GPU manufacturers like nVidia and AMD to implement non-blurry integer scaling (aka. pixel perfect scaling) for their drivers. Please consider taking a minute or two and signing the petition (or even better spreading the word). Other VNs with a low resolution of 800x600 and pixelart games might also benefit from this.

Petition:

https://www.change.org/p/nvidia-amd-nvi ... ics-driver

Pictures that show the difference between the regular scaling method and integer scaling:


http://www.scirra.com/images/point-vs-linear.png

Photos of some monitors:

Native resolution: http://abload.de/img/ftl-crop-tn3jy6y.jpg
2x integer scaling: http://abload.de/img/ftl-crop-nearestlhaw5.jpg
Regular scaling: http://abload.de/img/ftl-crop-bilinear6mb6e.jpg

An attempt to briefly summarize the whole story in a single picture:

https://image.ibb.co/gSvpL5/titan_upsca ... ator_5.png

Where the majority of the discussions regarding the problem and the solutions takes place:

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... er-ratios/

Note that sharing is damn important. The manufacturers will not be convinced if they don't see a huge mob of peasants with pitchforks. (Obviously I don't mean this literally, but you get the point.)
According discussions on the forums of all major manufacturers already exist (some longer than 30 pages), but the manufacturers do not seem to care. This has to change.

[Oddball]

I can't say it's ever bothered me.

[DerailedOmegaMale]

Supposedly the smearing due to the usage of a non-native resolution is a particularly big problem for people with a 4K Monitor. That's why the lack of integer scaling became such a heated debate during the last couple of years. I don't even have a 4K monitor, but the problem annoys me anyway.
I want to have every single pixel in an unharmed state. Instead I get to see a smeared out mess. And the higher you scale it, the worse it gets.
Of course you can disable scaling completely and have a small picture in the center of your screen, but that is kind of stupid for obvious reasons.
Then there is a walk-around with the "Magnifier" tool integrated into Windows, but it's a pain in the @#$ to use it.

[cpl_crud]

I have a 4k monitor, but I only do text (and maybe some YouTube) because I am too old for the internet, so I have never noticed this issue.

[DerailedOmegaMale]

I have a 4k monitor, but I only do text (and maybe some YouTube) because I am too old for the internet, so I have never noticed this issue.

And it's not relevant for text or videos. Moderns operating systems smooth the text by default and compressed videos already have smearing due to the compression artifacts.
Try playing a low res (something like 640x480) pixel art game in full screen mode and look at all the smeared out pixels. (Of course the game must not implement it's own scaling algorithm with software rendering. The operating system has to think "the game wants to run at a low resolution" and thus enable GPU or monitor based scaling. ) THEN you'll see what I mean. Pixel art just doesn't look like pixel art anymore.

[Mirage_GSM]

Seems like a quite specific problem...
I do play retro games now and again, and I've never encountered any problems (that I noticed).
Also, if I play retro games I don't have that high expectations of the graphics anyway

[DerailedOmegaMale]

Seems like a quite specific problem...
I do play retro games now and again, and I've never encountered any problems (that I noticed).
Also, if I play retro games I don't have that high expectations of the graphics anyway

Obviously you need to care in order to care. Did you play any pixel art games? Try one in full screen mode as already mentioned. Then compare it with windowed mode while zoomed in with the Magnifier program included into Windows. Zoom in at whole multiples of 100% until it no longer fits your screen. That's how proper integer scaling looks like.

[Mirage_GSM]

In general, if I have to view two pictures side by side or have to use third programs to zoom in to see the differences, then I'm good either way

[DerailedOmegaMale]

In general, if I have to view two pictures side by side or have to use third programs to zoom in to see the differences, then I'm good either way

Then you do not seem to care that the picture becomes blurry and that the stuff that is supposed to look like distinct pixels no longer looks that way. But some people care about that and find it annoying.

[ScotteinExile]

Unfortunately I play on a bad 60hz monitor in less than fullscreen, so I don't get the same problems (or luxuries)

[DerailedOmegaMale]

Unfortunately I play on a bad 60hz monitor in less than fullscreen, so I don't get the same problems (or luxuries)

It's an issue of resolution and has nothing to do with refresh rate. If you have a monitor with a resolution of 1280x1024 and want to play a game with a resolution of 640x480 then you can still benefit from this by up-scaling the game to 1280x960.

[Notguest]

Modern GPUs are high programmable. You can easily do perfect scaling if you want to.

If a game is blurry, it's due to either bad settings or not being programmed to scale properly. Either way, the issue isn't a lack of functionality.

Scaling in the hardware monitor is another issue, but many monitors will allow you to customize this as well.

[DerailedOmegaMale]

Modern GPUs are high programmable. You can easily do perfect scaling if you want to.

If a game is blurry, it's due to either bad settings or not being programmed to scale properly. Either way, the issue isn't a lack of functionality.

Scaling in the hardware monitor is another issue, but many monitors will allow you to customize this as well.

It doesn't seem like you're understanding the problem.

Of course modern mainstream GPUs are turning complete (or in other words arbitrary programmable) machines with a total theoretical computing power many orders of magnitude higher than modern mainstream multi core CPU. Of course you can program them in a way that they can take an arbitrary picture of yours and scale it in any way you desire in a tiny fraction of a second. There is no doubt about that. And that's not the problem that this topic is all about.
The problem is that there is no way to do the scaling while playing an arbitrary game in such a way that you still see the game on your monitor in real-time and with pixel perfect scaling as the actual scaling method. (Pixel perfect scaling ensures that all individual pixels still look like perfect squares instead of a blurry mess.) Of course GPUs are programmable, but they do not let you to reprogram the scaling method that they apply by themselves in realtime in order to match the low-resolution signal they produce with the monitor's native resolution.
The only options in the context of automatically applied realtime scaling you have with so far are: (1.) No scaling at all and only the original small image in the center of your monitor. (2.) Image is stretched to the whole screen. (3.) Image is stretched in a way that maximizes the area while keeping the original aspect ratio.
The last two of those options are based on the bilinear scaling algorithm which inevitably introduces blur. And you can't just tell your GPU: "Use a different scaling method instead." You're stuck with those three options and bilinear.
Of course if you are a game developer you can program your game in such a way that it scales the frames by itself and produces a signal that already matches the monitor's native resolution so that no further GPU based scaling is required. But as a user who plays the games made by other people who do not provide the source-code you can't replace the scaling algorithms built into the games or the GPU.

The proposed solution is that the GPU driver developers include pixel perfect scaling into the drivers as-well and let the users select it instead of bilinear scaling in order to avoid blur.

Regarding the monitor based scaling: Did you ever see a monitor that let's you select pixel perfect scaling? I didn't. Furthermore if the GPU did the job of pixel perfect scaling then the problem would be solved for ALL the monitors and ALL the games independent of what they do or do not support.