Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Is Integer scaling really a thing??
Intel gonna support Integer Scaling along with NN in their new gpus https://www.techpowerup.com/256801/intel...ics-lineup
There is much hype about Integer scaling in use for emulation, found on some forums, and there are many emu scaling guru's opinions how good IS is. As well mario game picture in above link tries to show the impact on emulation quality.

Since always, i have never used that ugly neirest neighbour scaling algo at all. IS looks the same to NN when use same factors like 2x2 or 3x3. There is a misunderstanding among people over the net what IS and NN gives. I saw tutorials with advice to switch to NN scaling in video player options during watching movies lol. Because monitors enable bilinear scaling on its own and introduse bluring. Crazy.

I went to official Intel FAQ and saw finally some sane statement: Users sometimes try to play games with various emulators. Most often in these scenarios, the emulator handles scaling on its own, and this cannot be resolved using Intel’s scaling implementation. I cannot imagine playing a nes/snes games on HD or 4k monitor without some pixelart scaling. Or..it is me who dont get it that watching huge pixels is a fun?

After all IS looks useful for really old PC games, that have implemented much lower max resolution than our monitor resolution. That way we can use IS to "integer magnify" game picture to avoid blurry Windows desktop scaling or monitor scaling.

Does anybody have different view on it?

In my opinion, it's nice for 2D games but there's no real reason to use it for 3D games.

It's great that a constructor FINALLY takes integer scaling seriously. I hope other constructors will follow up.

Almost all 4K TVs upscales 1080p with a blurry algorithm even if 2160p is perfectly 2x1080. It's not a big deal, but it's slightly noticeable for video games and kinda disappointing for me.

It's less a problem for 3D games but I remember playing at low res with my old laptop, and the NVidia interpolation was really ugly. Playing at 1:1 was good but small, line doubling would have been a neat option.

Edit : Also, better algorithms than bilinear and bicubic do exist to keep square pixels relatively sharp in fullscreen, like AANN and Sharp Bilinear, it's too bad users can't control it at driver level.

Integer scaling in Nvidia 436.02 drivers.  Just... how so sudden.

Yeah, couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the news yesterday. But as I feared, it'll be a Turing and onwards exclusive. It's still a beta feature, so there's a small chance that it'll become available on previous architectures in the future when it's complete.

it's $dominant_marketshare_company, I'm not holding my breath.

They've done it in the past, that's why I keep a tiny bit of hope. But yeah, I'm not holding my breath either.

Well it is not using the Tensor (AI) cores or the RT (ray tracing) cores since it is available on the GTX 1600 series, so there is at least an outside chance. Though to be fair if they do add it I will probably forget it exists like most of the options in Nvidia's control panel, until I run into a specific application that needs a specific setting to work.

I recently switched to AMD, I hope them to implement IS as well.