Widescreen Gaming Forum

Yes scaling is 100% guesswork. nothing more nothing less

Depends on personal taste... Starcraft in a small native rez box will give a very accurate but small (so a bit less immersive) image, which is what I like when the image is not too tiny ...
Starcraft upscaled will give a slightly fuzzy or blurry, bigger image ... no details are lost but since it's bigger it might give the impression to be less detailed ..

in dosbox I can either set the fullscreen resolution to something really big, and not use nvidia scaling, OR I can leave it small or 800x600 (I think the driver's minimum) and turn on scaling to get it filling the picture?
what's the difference in practice? in image? performance? is one software scaling (done on the cpu) and the other gpu scaling?

in performance with today's computer I doubt there's that much of a difference between dosbox doing the scaling itself or the GPU or the monitor doing the scaling

in image quality, I would advise against using the monitor for such a purpose.... Between the GPU & dosbox itself, it is a matter of taste. In general emulators allow more options, such as upscaling to a specific res or by a specific multiplier (double size) and/or several rendering choices which can affect the end result so as to look sharper or blurrier ... and then again, it's a question of taste, there's no single answer to something like that.

here's another: there's a field in the dosbox config called "scaler" which offers a bunch of different algorithms.

however, wouldn't it be more accurate to call this field "smoothing" or "filters" ? though some like normal also indirectly scale up the game, isn't the purpose to smooth pixel jaggies in various means? don't modern ports of old games on the 360 and such, and also emulators I've seen, have the same options but call this by my suggestions above?

comparing a game like Hexen with normal2x turned on and off (but higher resolution from fullresolution field) - normal2x makes the game look like shit and introduces more jaggies than were ever there.

isn't the fullresolution field for handling the actual "scaling" ? Why would you ever use the scaling field to do your scaling? seems you would only do it for smoothing out pixels

since it's an upscaling algorithm at the start with filtering options included , I guess "scaler" does make sense since it's purpose is not always to smooth jaggies, some smooth them but some also makes the image very sharp looking, and others are middle ground plus those old "scanlines type of look"

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler if you didn't find it before you might find that useful

normal2x doesn't introduce any more jaggies than were there at the start, however since it doubles all pixels in all dimensions it makes them more obvious to the naked eye, a bit like watching a photoshop image at a higher than normal zoom .... the photoshop image is not any less detailed, however jaggies appear when you saw none at normal zoom ...

you may think of this "scaler" like an initial scaling before any other modifications
as for the fullscreen resolution, it's been a while since I did use dosbox and I don't quite remember right now how it all works...
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf don't say much

edit: removed the negation from "didn't use"

Yes scaling is 100% guesswork. nothing more nothing less.

It is guesswork but it isn't random, there is some algorithm to it that theoretically should generate the same results

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicubic_interpolation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanczos_resampling

Those are all methods to how it interpolates the missing data. As far as I know one algorithm should come up with the same results each time but it is by chance that it comes up with the same results as a non scaled version in some parts.

normal2x doesn't introduce any more jaggies than were there at the start, however since it doubles all pixels in all dimensions it makes them more obvious to the naked eye, a bit like watching a photoshop image at a higher than normal zoom .... the photoshop image is not any less detailed, however jaggies appear when you saw none at normal zoom ...

That's not true. I don't know how you'd describe what I'm seeing then, but at the same size of image (in other words, taking up the exact same area on my display)

using normal2x without a doubt makes the image blocky and full of jaggies that were not there with that option turned off (set to none)

That's the only setting being changed, I've verified it several times. Hexen - even the title image becomes far worse with normal2x turned on.

How do you explain this?

That's not true. I don't know how you'd describe what I'm seeing then, but at the same size of image (in other words, taking up the exact same area on my display) using normal2x without a doubt makes the image blocky and full of jaggies that were not there with that option turned off (set to none)

That's the only setting being changed, I've verified it several times. Hexen - even the title image becomes far worse with normal2x turned on.

How do you explain this?

yeah of course the final image looks blockier/sharper with normal2x
I don't really know how to explain what I said better ...

let me see
ok totally different example to see if I can make you understand the weird things I'm saying ;)

If you take a real life magnifying glass and look at your LCD (while it's on), you may be able to see the RGB subpixels which compose the image that you see... Now, if you take the magnifying glass out, you don't see them anymore however they are still present just invisible to the naked eye ...

it's what I'm getting to, when using normal2x, each pixel of the image will be increased to a square of 4 pixels of the exact same color before being rescaled/filtered to whatever final resolution you use, now of course if you use other better scalers than normal 2x & 3x you'll get a smoother image.

In the end, I just realized that it probably comes down to semantics
For me, jaggies aren't "introduced", they are made visible... it probably is debatable :P :lol:

I'm just not sure why anyone would ever want to use it, if it looks worse than no scaling option.

Why in the world is it default?

Well because it's the less reworked image I guess. Whether or not this is "worse" or "better" is subjective and therefore a question of preference & opinion....

At some point I remember thinking that some of these scaling options were far too blurry (2xsai for example) for me and I preferred a dose of sharpness however I don't remember what my settings were :mrgreen:
Another reason is that "blurry rendering" cause loss of details which can be a bother depending on the specific game ...

You have to realize, if the game isn't displayed as a tiny window in the center of the screen, *something* is scaling it somehow. If DOSBox is simply outputting a 320x200 image, then either your graphics card or monitor is applying some scaling function, and it probably applies some sort of filter.

Think of it as a filtered texture vs. unfiltered texture in Quake. You say you prefer unfiltered texture. Some people prefer that their DOS games not be filtered too much. The jaggies that you see with normal2x were always there - they're just easier to see when you have big square pixels instead of small and/or round pixels.

I'm still not getting it. It sound like it's being compared to the other scaling options. Which I'm aware are filtering the textures, and cause the game to look more or less blurry.

But I'm talking about normal2x vs "none".

You're saying the game is as it always looked with "normal2x". Then why is "none" called "none"? It suggests nothing is being done, and THAT is the way the game looks naturally.


And yes I'm aware of what is scaling the game. That was original aim of thread - to determine whether I should do scaling via Fullresolution field in Dosbox, or through my gpu drivers in windows.


If normal2x is just a pixel doubler (and normal3x a pixel tripler), then they should look exactly the same as when setting the resolution to double or triple the original, correct?

I don't think they do. I'll check again.