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Would be interesting to see a poll on which is worse - slightly blurry "square" pixels, or slightly non-square "perfect" pixels. At a glance, I immediately noti
by bscphil 4y ago
Would be interesting to see a poll on which is worse - slightly blurry "square" pixels, or slightly non-square "perfect" pixels. At a glance, I immediately noticed how blurry the shader's pixels are, but it wasn't until reading this blog post that I even thought about the problem of fractional scaling for pixel art games.
Worth pointing out that most SNES games had a vertical resolution of 224 pixels. At that size an upscale for a 1080p screen results in a maximum pixel irregularity of 1/5 (most pixels are 5x5 with the occasional 4x5 and 4x4 pixels thrown in). That might be close to negligible on a moderately high DPI screen.
Interesting side note about modern pixel art games: Celeste has a native resolution of 320x180. That's almost exactly the same number of pixels (or scan lines) as a typical SNES game, but the number is chosen to divide evenly into 1920x1080 (and 1280x720), meaning that you can get perfect pixels on common modern resolutions without fractional scaling. Kind of brilliant, actually.
- leguminous 4y agoIt might also be worth noting that the SNES used non-square pixels. CRTs didn't really have a discrete horizontal resolution, so they could stretch the 8:7 image about 17% horizontally to 4:3. In other words, each pixel had a 7:6 aspect ratio. On an LCD, it's difficult to do this and still get all the pixels in the grid without any blurring or wobble. Even if you choose the vertical resolution as an exact multiple of 224, the horizontal resolution often won't be quite right. I believe 896x672 is the smallest resolution that will work exactly (for displaying 256x224 with 7:6 pixels).
- bscphil 4y agoGreat point, thanks!
- a_cardboard_box 4y agoA fixed background might look fine with some pixels being smaller, but if you scroll it around you change which pixels are smaller which is very noticeable at a 4:5 ratio.