Hey, everyone. For the last few days, I've been working on implementing a better scaling filter to use in OpenBOR. The test image I used to start with was the original Beats of Rage title screen, upscaled to 960*540. That's a scaling factor of 2.25, the same awkward factor you get when running a 640*480 game in fullscreen on a 1080p monitor. Anyway, images are more useful than words here. First, let's look at the two existing hardware filters.
The "simple" (nearst neighbor) filter:
While it's the ideal option at integer scaling factors, the simple filter looks clearly awful here. 3/4 of the rows and columns of pixels from the original image are duplicated twice while the other 1/4 show up three times, and the result is that the text (and everything else, really) is badly misshapen.
The bilinear filter:
Bilinear looks the same regardless of the scaling factor. Nothing is misshapen, but everything is blurred together. The text in particular appears darker than it should, and loses its sharpness.
The new high-quality filter:
This is the new filter I'm working on, which I want to make the default for fullscreen on PC. As you can see, it looks good even with strange scaling factors like 2.25 - the color of the text is preserved, you can still distinguish the individual pixels, and nothing is misshapen
While it isn't in the SVN repo yet, I've finished implementing the filter; all that's left is to properly integrate it into the options menu. It should be ready sometime next week, and if people are okay with it, I'd like it to replace bilinear as the default scaling filter for fullscreen mode. What does everyone think?
The "simple" (nearst neighbor) filter:
While it's the ideal option at integer scaling factors, the simple filter looks clearly awful here. 3/4 of the rows and columns of pixels from the original image are duplicated twice while the other 1/4 show up three times, and the result is that the text (and everything else, really) is badly misshapen.
The bilinear filter:
Bilinear looks the same regardless of the scaling factor. Nothing is misshapen, but everything is blurred together. The text in particular appears darker than it should, and loses its sharpness.
The new high-quality filter:
This is the new filter I'm working on, which I want to make the default for fullscreen on PC. As you can see, it looks good even with strange scaling factors like 2.25 - the color of the text is preserved, you can still distinguish the individual pixels, and nothing is misshapen
While it isn't in the SVN repo yet, I've finished implementing the filter; all that's left is to properly integrate it into the options menu. It should be ready sometime next week, and if people are okay with it, I'd like it to replace bilinear as the default scaling filter for fullscreen mode. What does everyone think?
