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Integer Resizing (is it available?)

O

oneWonders

n00b
Joined
Apr 20, 2012
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13
I would like monitors to be able to provide integer resizing for non-native resolutions that are taken in by monitors.
This would be useful for old SD consoles and also software that only supports certain resolutions in fullscreen mode.

What i want is for the monitor to work out say "okay, the input is x*y, i have a resolution of a*b", i can resize the picture up 4 times and leave a black border around both the sides and top / bottom.
This would mean that any non-native resolution would actually look good as it would never actually be scaled.
For a 4 times resize, the pixels would simply be duplicated 4 times horizontally and vertically!

Not only would it be extremely fast and not add more input lag that is synonymous with rescaling, but it would also be incredibly sharp, with minimal black bars.

Take a 320*240p signal, on a 1920 * 1200 monitor, this can resize exactly 5 times to 1600*1200, leaving black bars only at the sides.
On a 1920*1080 monitor, it would resize exactly 4 times to 1280*960, leaving black bars at both the sides and top/bottom.

I really don't understand why this is not an option as it seems so obvious and would make things better.
Instead they don't allow this, and even when you have a situation where the resolution you are scaling to is an EXACT fit (say 320*240 on a 1920*1200 monitor where the vertical rescale is exact), it does not just duplicate the pixels but instead applies a really stupid and ridiculous bilinear scaling filter (or similar) that makes the image horrible and blurry.

At least provide this as an option, it wouldn't be hard to do!
Also an option to force 4/3 aspect ratio on certain SD signals would be nice too, for things that were designed for older crt monitors or sd tvs with non-square "pixels".


So, how can we make the industry aware of this and encourage them to implement it (or something similar)?

Thanks
 
Whats kind of funny is my Viewsonic VP2290b (3840x2400 LCD) from 2003 does this for its scaling. It does resolutions like 1280x1024 and what not that it can't perfectly pixel double and it puts very slight borders around the vertical as well as the horizontal (as its widescreen).

Never seen another LCD scale like that but I think they figured it was so high resolution it wasn't had to do 3 or 4x the number of pixels for width/height.
 
What you mean is what I call "1:1 scaling".

I know that AMD Catalyst will scale 1280x800 to 2560x1600 exactly which is 1:4 or 1x1:2x2.

It looked somewhat blocky and far worse than I expected but definitely 1:1.

edit: DOSBox also supports exact scaling of 2x, 3x, 4x and MadVR possibly
 
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some new monitors are doing this as well nothing the user has to do it will size up automatically or size down if user requires, some from Phillips, BenQ, Acer, and I believe LG.
 
Do any monitors that do this actually just map the map (double) the pixels though?
Because on any monitor i have seen it before, they still bilinear scale the whole image so that it ends up look blurry and there are no sharp edges (rather than pixely, as preferred).

It is kind of like 1:1 pixel mapping yes, but in the crucial sense that it will resize up if there is room. As far as i am aware, 1:1 pixel mapping doesn't do this? In effect it would be 1:N pixel mapping.

I know you can do it in some programs and emulators but it is not always possible in every circumstance, which is why it is preferable that the monitor can do it itself :)

As i say, all i've seen is monitors that add bilinear filtering and also will scale so that there is at least one axis that fills the screen (rather than having integer resizing and black bars on both axis where applicable).
Some kind of more detail on the new stuff would be cool as i want to be sure it is doing it 'properly' :)
 
Okay, i tried on a monitor with 1:1 pixel mapping (hp zr2440w) and it doesn't do what i want - as i had suspected.

I will enclose some example images to show what i mean.
Basically, for a 640*480 source at 1920*1080 resolution, (black bars shown as green, in order to distinct them from the background).
Please click thumbnails and view fullsize to see what i mean!

1:1 pixel mapping does this:



Fit to aspect does this:


Both of these are not desirable! 1:1 pixel mapping is far too small and fit to aspect is really blurry because it is not an integer scaling factor and also uses bilinear filtering.


What i would like is for the display to pixel double the image to the highest integer it can (in this case 2x, but potentially 3x, 4x for higher res displays or lower res input sizes).
I don't want any scaling filters to be applied at all as the whole point is to keep it pixel sharp, no bilinear filtering!
This is what i am after:



Notice how much sharper it is. I realise you will get pixelation this way, but that is entirely the point - the image stays as sharp and true as possible.

So, does anyone know any displays that can do this?
Or is it something that we must beg manufacturers for?

Not only would it be a lot clearer / sharper for 480p consoles, but it would be a lot faster too - as no scaling means a lot less input lag!
 
I've only found software solution for this so far (dosbox, madVR...) - mostly for some old games like Little Big Adventures (have to combine it with 1:1 pixel mapping in your video/monitor settings of course)
.
But a monitor that can natively do this would be awesome if you ask me! I've never seen one though.
 
The 39 inch seiki 4k display flashed with the 39 inch firmware seems to do this. You can see it in my pictures:


Here is the 39 inch standard firmware:



And here is with the 50 inch firmware. The difference is plain.



I have mainly only did 1920x1080 and 1280x720 which I can confirm both do this but I can try some lower resolutions for you as well when I get home later tonight. It will also do 120Hz at the lower resolutions and is very low input lag.

I can even take pictures of that diagram to show you what it looks like. Unfortunatley lower rsolutions (640x480, 800x600, etc..) don't fit perfectly but it does appear to keep things sharp but you may notice some odd un-even pixel doubling here and there as it doesn't divide evenly. Let me know if you want me to do this.
 
out of curiosity, is 39" Seiki with 50" firmware doing 120Hz @ 1080p without frame-skipping?
 
XoR said:
out of curiosity, is 39" Seiki with 50" firmware doing 120Hz @ 1080p without frame-skipping?
Click to expand...

Yes it does 120Hz without frame skipping.

Here are some images of running 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. Unfortunately the monitor streteches it to fit the full screen. If I chose 'dot to dot' mode its a far cry from being full screen but correct aspect. That being said doing 856x480 and 1064x600 seemed to generate much better results if things can be aspect scaled in the program. Here are the images:










Unfortunately the pictures came out kind of blurry likely due to the fact the background was black and the circles were wite. I have a feeling with more light (white background they would have came out better.
 
Thanks for the pictures, can you do 640*480 dot for dot mode, so i can get a better understanding of what it is doing?

From what you say, I'm (sadly) thinking it just does a nearest neighbour scale rather than integer resizing.
It's sad cos integer resizing (basically just pixel doubling and padding) would be a lot faster cos you wouldn't have to do any scaling interpolation at all and it would be the sharpest.

The reason 720p and 1080p work as shown above is that they both scale exactly into 4k resolution (3* and 2* respectively). Things like 640*480 (standard 480p) do not (4.5*) and so with my method, it would resize to 2560*1920.
This would leave 240 pixels vertical padding, so 120 top and bottom. (And 1280 horizontal padding - 640 each side).

If it is doing it correctly then the 640*480 image should be 88.888...% of the vertical size.

Thanks :)
 
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OP, what you're looking for is a line doubler (or line quadrupler). How old are the consoles you're talking about? If you're talking old like SNES, NES, Turbografx 16, or similar, then check out these sites:

http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/
http://shmups.system11.org/ (lots of info on hardware, not just Shmups)
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/forum.php
http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php
http://www.videogameperfection.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/Faginrs500

Some monitors scale better than others (same with TVs and video processors) but I wouldn't expect any to do what you want well enough. Most people would want all video content to fill their entire screen all the time, even when it messes up the scaling. And very few monitors have configurable scaling settings.
 
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Thanks for the links.

I'm not sure a line doubler / quadrupler would be smart enough to be honest, as it wouldn't pad the output.

Now that i come to think of it, a method of specifying the desired input Pixel Aspect Ratio would be good too (So the image could be integer sizes and then horizontally linearly resized for maximum quality). This would be useful for the very older consoles with non-square pixels (but different for each game). However for a lot of those, emulation is pretty decent (thankfully).

Specifically i am talking about gamecube/wii, playstation 2 and xbox. It would even be useful for ps3 / 360 though, in coming years when screen resolutions increase.

Nintendo 64 is another problem though, but then it is expensive to get games for and considering my system is pal and the quality of pal ports mostly not great, i shan't think i will bother too much. Can't get rgb out either.
Sadly emulation isn't great for it though, which is sad.
 
Micomsoft's XRGB line is generally considered among the best products for what you want to do, but aren't cheap. I just got an XRGB FrameMeister (what you want for HDMI connectivity) myself; for VGA there is the previous model the XRGB-3. The FrameMeister will have support for more output resolutions. XRGB-3 lacks on output resolutions (I think it's generally used at XGA), but is faster (lower processing latency).
 
Yer unfortunately those are really expensive! And it would still be a lot faster for the monitor to do this simple task itself :/

In some ways it would be cool for someone to start an open source scaler project or at least a DIY one so people could buy bits and make their own.

Or have some device similar to a raspberry pi, with really fast input channels that you could effectively program and output from (though i dunno whether it is possible to do that fast enough or if the latency is too high).

With either of these approaches, i think that is one of the few ways people can get "exactly what they want" and at a very low lag, and decent price.

Currently it's kind of a bad situation for that though :/
 
Yer i read that GBS-8220 added quite a bit of lag and ghosting?

Also even using it purely to transcode component i guess it wouldn't be the most useful as it cannot do 720p output, only 1366x768 - even if you can get it to pad 720p input to that, it's still not ideal.

Strange cos it seems to accept 720p and 1080p over component. At least you can get one for less than £20 though but still, it's not ideal sadly.


A raspberry pi type device with low overhead and fast I/O would be good, then you could basically make your own scaler with projects like Dscaler:

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/
 
oneWonders said:
A raspberry pi type device with low overhead and fast I/O would be good, then you could basically make your own scaler with projects like Dscaler:

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/
Click to expand...

No, Raspberry Pi is not a viable idea (not sure why people seem to think they are useful for anything, but that is far from the case in actuality), and this would not be a low-latency solution, either. And it would probably cost you as much or more than an XRGB.

Not many games need really low input latency, so I think you are probably wasting your time in caring, unless you play Dance Dance Revolution or something.
 
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