Is that through DVI?

I'm like you, 4:3 aspect ratio is a must 😀

Nvidia has two scaling options. One is preserving the 4:3 ratio but scaling it to maximise vertical size. The other one is 1:1 pixel mapping leaving black bars all around. But I never observed a soft or blurry image. And this goes back to cards like the GeForce4 which also does scaling.

BTW I use a 24" 1920 x 1200 monitor which gives me native 1600 x 1200 pixels. It surely is pretty 😀

There are also 1366 x 768 screens with 4:3 aspect ratio mode. Perfect for 1024 x 768 but for my taste too small. I got a 18" Philips that does this, but I couldn't get over the tiny image...

Could you take an image / screenshot / capture of this issue? It's quite rare you know.

Now this is under Windows 7 right? And this also happens when you set the desktop resolution to 1024 x 768?

The display doesn't have a DVI input. The old D-Sub for this one.

As for the 1:1 scaling option, yes, it does preserve the aspect ratio and the image is perfectly sharp and nice. The thing is, the picture is quite small. I'm willing to accept it if I don't find a solution to my problem as it is, still, not much smaller than the 1024x768 Dell display. I would really like to find a way to use as much of the screen as possible, though.

Oddly enough, I am unable to take a screenshot of the phenomenon as the end product is a file with the resolution of 1024x768. The scaling blur is simply not there as the upscaling is not preserved in the screenshot.

Yes, this is under Windows 7 and yes, it also occurs when I set the desktop resolution to 1024x768. The image has the correct aspect ratio but rather than be pixelated, it's blurry as heck.

If the screenshot is 1024 x 768 then your monitor does the scaling. If the GPU does the scaling you would get a letteboxed 1280 x 1024 image.

VGA scaling on Nvidia cards can be hit and miss. They really optimised it for DVI.

Now I don't know about your area but 19" LCD monitors with VGA and DVI ports should be dirt cheap. You should get them for free if you ask / look around. Most offices / companies have them stacking up in the computer room. Talk to the technical people 😀

That's why I said "oddly enough". I checked and GPU scaling is enabled in the control panel and though I expected to get a blurry 1280x1024 picture in the screenshot, I got a perfectly sharp 1024x768 picture instead. Apparently the scaling doesn't work quite the way we both thought.

As for getting a different display - I will consider that option some day perhaps, but right now it's not an option as in my area (Poland) nobody gives anything away. Not even old LCDs. I checked. They are fairly cheap but finding one without any cracks, issues or dead pixels is a pain. Mint-condition displays are still worth money I can't afford to spend right now. Steam special offers are to blame for that.

He's probably just complaining about bilinear scaling, which is what Nvidia GPUs do when you tell them to scale the image; nothing to do about that. There's no setting to change that or any aspect of how the scaling is done (personally I want an option for exact 2x/3x/4x/etc scaling).

What you can do however if you don't mind the black bars is switch scaling mode to "No scaling" (on the same screen where you choose to do scaling on GPU or Display).

Personally as someone who loves sharp pixels and hates black bars, I really think you should just stick with the bilinear scaling. It's the best image quality you'll get. Doing sharp scaling from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 will result in a ton of artifacts.

There's two things that you can do for some games if you want sharp scaling though: Use software that does surface redirection (DXGL, DxWnd) or emulate other versions of the games (emulators generally offer good scaling options).

I have to ask since you failed to specifically mention it: Have you checked your display's settings? Your display might have scaling settings or at the very least a sharpness setting if you don't mind artificial sharpening.

Emulation is something I would rather not do if the game runs natively under Windows 7. If there's one thing I care about more than big, sharp image, it's performance.

My display doesn't have any scaling settings. Sharpness is already set at 100 so it's not like it can do anything about it. I'm left at the mercy of my GPU to do anything about the problem.

The image is coming out at 1024x768 because that's what's being rendered - that is, the application is generating that. The GPU is performing the scaling "after the fact" - so that's why the SS isn't working. The "bluriness" is either in the scaling itself, or the monitor is at fault - have you tried forcing the monitor to auto adjust when the game starts with the scaled image? Also is the GPU scaling system changing refresh rate (it isn't 75 MHz - it's 75 Hz; but it may be defaulting to 60 Hz in a scaling option and the monitor's timing is "wrong" for that mode without an adjustment)?

On the game itself, can you just force the resolution higher internally? (a lot of games will allow you to do this even if the option doesn't "exist" in whatever configurator utility - usually in a cfg file associated with the game) From there you could set things to 1280x960 or what-have-you.

Another option is if the game supports 1280x720 in its existing menus - the monitor may display that natively (on both of my 17" monitors they will display any 1280x* resolution natively by default) - should be fairly sharp although you won't have 100% screen coverage.

FINALLY as far as hooking up the Dell - just set it to clone with the Samsung at 1024x768 when gaming, and you'll just turn off or ignore the Samsung when you're gaming. Wouldn't be terribly hard to configure that.

Auto adjust didn't make a difference. I tried setting the desktop refresh rate to 60 Hz and made sure it's also 60 Hz in game. No difference.

As for the configuration file, I went to the game folder and sure enough, Config.cfg was right there with the resolution settings. I put in 1280x960 and it works like a charm. No distortions, no errors, the GUI is properly scaled (which begs the question: why didn't the programmers put the higher resolutions onto the list in the configurator if they work just fine?). Thank you for that idea very much indeed 😀

Sadly, life is probably not good enough for every game I will ever want to play to have a convenient .cfg file like that.

About cloning the screens: It's an interesting idea but then the size advantage is marginal. The Dell's picture is literally about an inch bigger when the Samsung is at 1024x768 with no scaling. Now that I think about it, I don't think it's worth it. If the Dell was also to sit on my desk next to the Samsung, it would take a considerable amount of space, and it would also cover up the right speaker. Nah, I think I would rather tolerate smaller picture with just one display on my desk.

Yasashii wrote:

As for the configuration file, I went to the game folder and sure enough, Config.cfg was right there with the resolution settings. I put in 1280x960 and it works like a charm. No distortions, no errors, the GUI is properly scaled (which begs the question: why didn't the programmers put the higher resolutions onto the list in the configurator if they work just fine?). Thank you for that idea very much indeed 😀

Sadly, life is probably not good enough for every game I will ever want to play to have a convenient .cfg file like that.

Good to hear it worked. 😀

As far as games working or not working with some sort of "hack" method like that - there's maybe a handful I can think of that are completely lost causes in that respect, but in most cases you can cheat with settings here and there. As far as why the developers didn't enable higher resolution modes or other features, it's likely either because they didn't have the desire to test all of the modes (I've had some games where you can force much higher resolutions/settings than the "default" allows, and it can actually run into problems as a result), or because computers at the time weren't likely to be able to handle the performance requirements running at higher resolutions/settings so they pick an "average limit" to prevent CS calls over poor performance. 😒

About cloning the screens: It's an interesting idea but then the size advantage is marginal. The Dell's picture is literally about an inch bigger when the Samsung is at 1024x768 with no scaling. Now that I think about it, I don't think it's worth it. If the Dell was also to sit on my desk next to the Samsung, it would take a considerable amount of space, and it would also cover up the right speaker. Nah, I think I would rather tolerate smaller picture with just one display on my desk.

Gotcha. I was thinking you already had them both hooked up for dual monitor to begin with - if you're having to re-arrange everything for the additional monitor that's kind of a pain though. 😵

Yasashii wrote:

Sadly, life is probably not good enough for every game I will ever want to play to have a convenient .cfg file like that.

Surely not every game, but it shouldn't hurt to check wsgf.org first.

Yeah but that website doesn't usually have the games I'm looking for.

Btw. anybody know how to make Beetle Crazy Cup (a.k.a. Beetle Buggin') run at higher resolutions than 1024x768? I checked every file I was able to open with Notepad and I tried running the game with the "-w 1280 -h 960" parameters in the shortcut to no avail. Also, since copy of the game I have comes preinstalled, there are no reg entries for it.

Yasashii wrote:

Yeah but that website doesn't usually have the games I'm looking for.

Btw. anybody know how to make Beetle Crazy Cup (a.k.a. Beetle Buggin') run at higher resolutions than 1024x768? I checked every file I was able to open with Notepad and I tried running the game with the "-w 1280 -h 960" parameters in the shortcut to no avail. Also, since copy of the game I have comes preinstalled, there are no reg entries for it.

Preinstalled on what?

As far as making it run at higher resolutions - have you checked to see if it stores configuration/save data outside of the main installation? (A lot of games actually do that - usually it's under My Documents but sometimes it's more obtuse than that; check User Data (usually a hidden folder by default Windows settings) for example).

There is zero data outside of the game folder. By pre-installed I mean the game was already installed by someone on their computer, and the game folder was put into a .rar file. If the installer put any entries to the registry or files anywhere else, they remained on that person's computer.

Still if a game required such files and it detected that they are missing, it would likely have created them or displayed an error message upon first run. I've run the game several times already and still can't find any files connected with it.

Buy the original version. Abandonware is a forbidden subject here.

Good luck trying to find a CD of that game in Poland...

You could try some tool like Sysinternals Process Monitor to log what files and registry entries the game accesses. Maybe a config file or registry config is optional.

Bored today, just to showcase what I think he's talking about:

Here is Starcraft resized bi-linearly, which I believe is what the Nvidia drivers do. Image looks nice, if blurry.

Here it's resized using nearest neighbor, the sort of "sharp" resizing I think he wants. Notice the uneven scaling of the fonts and progress bar in the bottom. Personally I don't like this.

Here is what I think is the ideal way to scale old pixel games, nearest neighbor scaling to 2x/3x (or higher) of the image and bilinear resizing the rest of the way. Sharper than plain bi-linear and less obvious artifacts.

The third example is what he's getting (highest multiplier of 1024x768 that fits in 1280x1024 is... well 1x) and I personally think that's the best image quality you'll get. For 640x480 games I recommend using tools similar to the ones I mentioned to scale 2x and let driver resizing do the rest.

That is, if you're unwilling to switch GPU (I think AMD does artifical sharpening on upscale, so I'm not sure you'll like that either), monitor or buy an external scaling unit (which would add input lag).

Of course if you can get the games themselves to run in native resolution that's better, but that's not going to be an option for many old games, especially not since you need either 1280x960 or 1280x1024 and neither are that well supported resolutions.

Yasashii

It might be possible to output a centered image without scaling using the "Custom Resolution" feature rather than "GPU scaling".

Under Change Resolution, where you can pick from a list of preset resolutions, there should be button called "Customize". There you might be able add a preset for your desired smaller resolution, so that it has the timings of the Native resolution (something around ~1400*1060), but fewer active pixels (1024*768), and also reported to Windows as containing the desired number of pixels (1024*768), essentially having the video adapter waste some time drawing black bars.

I have a 1024*768 screen (specifically obtained for playing old games), and this way I can get a centered 800*600 picture on it. I have only used it on VGA output. It might not work for DVI, although I have heard people use this feature with flat televisions for differerent goals. I'm not sure if terms such as "sync" have any meaning over DVI. Also, trying to add a centered 640*480 resolution always locked up the system. It could be that the size of the black bars is limited. Always double check the numbers.

The custom resolution should override any existing resolutions of the same dimensions (pixels and refresh rate). The timings of the native resolution could be obtained in the same program and then written down. You would probably want the native and customized resolutions to use the exact same parameters to prevent mode changes with possible unwanted auto adjust taking place. The picture will need to be manually centered by adjusting the front porch and sync width values.

An example where I added a few different resolutions which are shown as centered frame on the monitor.

I asked NVIDIA directly and through their forums years ago for an alternate upscaling filter; never got a positive response. Just confused forum people who don't understand image scaling to begin with or recommend 1:1.

What you really need to be accurate is not just nearest neighbor filtering (but that would likely be good enough!); rather something like what the "pixellize" or pixellate filters in various emulators do; where it reduces pixel artifacts mathematically as well. Such a filter would actually be much faster than the bicubic or multi-tap filters used by graphics vendors.

The best scaler I've used in an LCD has been the HP w2408H and it's related w2207H model. With aspect ratio scaling you get something that is close to a pixel resize - just a slight amount of blur and ringing from sharpening. It can be varied by the sharpness setting. Certain resolutions look better than others. 1024x768 is particularly sharp. But you can see the pixel resizing artifacts that are akin to nearest neighbor.

TLDR: NV and AMD aren't going to offer this feature any time soon. You may occasionally find monitor review authors comment and test the scaler quality; but that's rare. It's assumed to be bilinear-ish.