Dolphin not respecting scaling settings

[twocows]

Hello,

Apologies if I missed something. Dolphin doesn't seem to be respecting the scaling settings I have configured in Nvidia control panel. I have "no scaling" set, which should mean if I run in full screen exclusive at 1x native, it should render in a tiny box in the middle of the screen with black bars on all sides. Instead, it seems to be scaling to match the vertical resolution of the screen while maintaining the aspect ratio. I did a search for scaling issues in Dolphin, but the search terms are too generic to come up with meaningful results. Any idea what's going on?

Tested in both DX11 and OpenGL backends (Vulkan just crashes entirely), played around with some other settings but couldn't get it working. These are my graphics settings at the moment. https://i.imgur.com/vLCBW4e.png

I've tested some other programs and they do appear to respect the scaling settings, so I don't think it's a configuration issue with Nvidia control panel, the OS, or my display itself. It just seems to be Dolphin that is ignoring my scaling settings.

[MayImilae]

Nvidia's scaling only works if the application in question changes the screen resolution. Dolphin doesn't, our Internal Resolution setting only changes Dolphin's rendering resolution and doesn't touch the display resolution at all. Since there is no display resolution change, integer scaling has nothing to do.

However, we do have the ability to change the display resolution; we have just hidden in outside of our GUI since most people don't need it and having two resolutions was confusing to users. To use it, go to your global user directory, which is placed by default on Windows in [username]\Documents\Dolphin, open Config, and edit GFX.ini. Under "[Adapter]", add "FullscreenDisplayRes = 640x480" (no quotes of course). Note that this will only work for fullscreen NTSC games, you'll need a different resolution for PAL, and widescreen is messy due to the whole non-square pixels business. Also you'll probably want to enable Crop for this.

Spoiler:

To elaborate on the non square pixels thing, when running in Widescreen the GameCube and Wii don't actually change their output resolutions, it remains 640x528. Instead, it relies on non-square pixels to achieve the effect. This worked totally fine on CRTs, but can be pretty atrocious on modern displays unless you throw resolution at them to work around it. And your use case doesn't allow for that, sooooo, for best results set the display resolution to 854x480 (16:9 480p, 720x480 is incorrect as that also uses non-square pixels!), then run widescreen games at 2x native. Since you are running the screen at 854x480 with integer scaling, that will look as close as possible to your desired native widescreen 480p.

[twocows]

Nvidia's scaling only works if the application in question changes the screen resolution. Dolphin doesn't, our Internal Resolution setting only changes Dolphin's rendering resolution and doesn't touch the display resolution at all. Since there is no display resolution change, integer scaling has nothing to do.

However, we do have the ability to change the display resolution; we have just hidden in outside of our GUI since most people don't need it and having two resolutions was confusing to users. To use it, go to your global user directory, which is placed by default on Windows in [username]\Documents\Dolphin, open Config, and edit GFX.ini. Under "[Adapter]", add "FullscreenDisplayRes = 640x480" (no quotes of course). Note that this will only work for fullscreen NTSC games, you'll need a different resolution for PAL, and widescreen is messy due to the whole non-square pixels business. Also you'll probably want to enable Crop for this.

Spoiler:

To elaborate on the non square pixels thing, when running in Widescreen the GameCube and Wii don't actually change their output resolutions, it remains 640x528. Instead, it relies on non-square pixels to achieve the effect. This worked totally fine on CRTs, but can be pretty atrocious on modern displays unless you throw resolution at them to work around it. And your use case doesn't allow for that, sooooo, for best results set the display resolution to 720x480, then run widescreen games at 2x native. Since you are running the screen at 720x480 with integer scaling, that will look as close as possible to your desired native 720x480.

Awesome, thank you so much!