First post, by eierfrucht
I wasn't able to find Dege's e-mail address on his home page so I decided to ask here.
O great Dege, do you have any plans to add support for hardware-accelerated 2D upscaling?
Popular old 2D games like Arcanum, Fallout Tactics, Knights of Honor or Celtic Kings all have fan-made HD patches; the problem is that even on large displays, everything is just too small at 1920x1080 (I"m not even mentioning UHD or 4K)
The best kind of scaling is probably achieved at 1366x768 or 1440x900. The bad thing is that most displays -- quite naturally -- do a very poor upscaling job.
All these games seem to work with dgVoodoo2 (with certain tweaks) so I thought that if would be really cool to implement a hardware-accelerated 2D upscaler.
The first thing that came to my mind is a simple Bicubic filter -- even it would yield a much better looking picture as long as the display keeps its native resolution and does no scaling of its own.
The second thing is this sophisticated open-source upscaler: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/
It does an amazing job upscaling Heroes of Might & Magic III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HjObkE2Pks
Alas, HoMM III uses a custom-made render wrapper https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/eng/description that was designed on purpose for this game only.
Another thing that came to my attention is that Arcanum and Fallout Tactics, when launched with dgVodoo, get quite laggy; this seems inexplicable since some old 3D games like Sacred or Might & Magic 8 also use DX8/DX7 but actually get a noticeble performance boost with dgVoodoo.
Even if it's impossible to implement XBRZ, could you possibly just add a simple, late-stage Bicubic upscaler that treats every finished frame (rendered at 800x600, 1024x768, 1368x768, 1440x900, etc) as a 3D surface then upscales it to the display's native resolution using hardware acceleration? DirectX 11 should offer a good variety of texture scaling options...