The options I like to use are:

1366 x 768 18.5" LCD with aspect ratio control and play at 1024 x 768 (downside: small image)
1920 x 1080" LCD with custom resolution of 1440 x 1080 and editing game (downside, not possible for all games, video cards)
1920 x 1200 LCD with aspect ratio (downside: expensive, not many screens anymore, taxing on graphics card, tiny UI elements)
1280 x 1024 LCD (downside 5:4 and stretched with some games, not all games, but most, support 1024 x 768)

duralisis wrote:

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.

I don't think nearest neighbor filtering by itself is enough, scaling artifacts gets really obvious (I should rehost that screenshot) even with 640x480 and it gets worse with 800x600 and 1024x768.

Of course that changes if you have a really high resolution monitor, but 1080p really isn't enough for that sort of scaling. 2560x1440 doesn't need it for 640x480 (3x) and isn't enough for 800x600 or 1024x768. 4K might do decently for some games.

1024*768, 1280*720, 1280*960 or anything in between are working for me now on a 1280*1024 LCD monitor. The image is perfectly sharp, and I could even put it in one corner of the screen should I want to. I'm disappointed that the screen actually attempts to scale 960 up to 1024, which is totally pointless compared to just padding it with narrow black bars with the height of the taskbar. 720 pixel height resolution can prove useful to make captures for youtube and preview them undistorted.

It seems that the difference between Active pixels and Total pixels can't be too great. 800*600 doesn't work on this display anymore, because it is "not supported by the display" [adapter]. The lowest I could go was 860 * 800.

Monitor sees all resolutions as its native, and reports it so on the OSD. Another downside is that on this screen pixels are noticeably smaller.

"not supported by the display" with the monitors I have is usually a hint towards refresh rate rather than resolution.

This looks like a limitation of the card or driver. Because if I output a signal that is actually unsupported by the display (such as 50 Hz that works on my Sony but not on a newer LG), the display "sees" it and says "out of range" and goes dark. The card is none the wiser that this has happened.

Yes and that's why there the user has to OK the change and if not, or pressing ESC, the system switches back to the previous resolution.

This is through the OS and driver.

If you are doing this in a game then you are flying blind and hopefully there is an easy sequence to quite the game like ALT F4 😀

I like messing with scaling and the different software and driver options we have for it. I finally got Command & Conquer playing nice. 760x400 native resolution (unofficial patch) pixel doubled to 1580x800 with cnc-ddraw and aspect ratio corrected stretch to 1770x1080 (75px black borders) with Nvidia drivers.

Really want a higher resolution monitor. 1080p really isn't enough to scale resolutions above 320x240 well. 4K G-Sync IPS/VA when 🙁 . I would even take a good Freesync monitor (I would rather avoid AMD GPUs).

What I was going to mention was a "fun" bug in Nvidia drivers: if you add a custom resolution, it must be the same refresh rate as the one you're currently in. Switch refresh rate to the same refresh rate you want before adding custom resolutions.

More scaling examples (ignore the filenames). View 1:1 at a 1080p monitor.

Here's C&C, which is a worst case scenario if you want clean scaling with black bars since it doesn't use square pixels and MUST be stretched on a modern display. nearest.png is nearest filtering and while it looks very sharp, scaling artifacts are obvious. Text is the most obvious way to see it, look how different the "A" is in "Flame tank" and "Artillery". Look at how the "T"s are longer on the top left and shorter on the top right. Look at how different the top and bottom of the "B" in "Buggy" is (and notice "Sandbags" is correct).

fullbilinear.png is actually hermite scaling. I'll be honest, I have no clue what these words mean. It looks similar to bilinear though, and look, the artifacts in the nearest image are nearly gone here. Obviously, it's a more accurate depiction of the source image

doublebiliniear.png is a clean 2x resize followed by hermite scaling the rest of the way. Looks much sharper than the full bilinear that some scaling options gives you, but artifacts are still pretty hard to spot.

Of course GPU manufacturers go with doing bilinear scaling because it will always look accurate to the source image. Well Nvidia does that anyway. ATI doesn't seem to give a crap what the source image looks like because IIRC, they even do artificial sharpening in their scaler...

Could you please expand on how you created those? Are these on ATI or Nvidia cards or a screenshot and then post processing?

Those are screenshots resized using an image editor (from a 640x400 lossless source).

Nvidia's GPU scaling basically does bilinear scaling.
AMD's does something weird that involves artificial sharpening at the end.

Ok thanks for clearing this up.

Been mucking around with Nvidia's Super Dynamic Resolution on my GTX 660. Nice to see that Nvidia made this available on older cards.

Quite impressed but it only works by offering multiples (max 4x) of that native resolution.

It can't (yet) offer multiples of old 4:3 resolutions. Might be worth contacting Nvidia about it because in those games that do support, or can be made to work, at 1080p, SDR is quite impressive.

Now I haven't yet tried this on a 5:4 aspect ratio monitor to see if the SDR resolution will be a multiple of 1280 x 1024. That could be interesting...