Scaling of 1080P games on a 4K monitor

Comixbooks

Comixbooks

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How do isometric games like Divinity Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity scale on 4K
or do just the First person shooter look good because of the cramping of details are the games black boxed around the edges or anything like that or do they look the same as 1080P but with more pixels so they look better. Cause someone told me games like Pillars of Eternity look zoomed out on a 4k which is the last thing I want in a monitor so you can't see anything.

I'm thinking of buying a 24" 4K but just don't want to make a mistake and have it playable for some games and not others since it's not very large #1 #2 switching between 3 monitors on the desk would prove to be cramping.
 
I just watched some You tube videos of 4K isometric games think I'll stay away till a decent small 1440P monitor comes out.
It's really zoomed out not that bad in Divinity but worse in Pillars of Eternity I could imagine how bad it would be on a 24" 4k.
 
Comixbooks said:
How do isometric games like Divinity Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity scale on 4K
or do just the First person shooter look good because of the cramping of details are the games black boxed around the edges or anything like that or do they look the same as 1080P but with more pixels so they look better. Cause someone told me games like Pillars of Eternity look zoomed out on a 4k which is the last thing I want in a monitor so you can't see anything.

I'm thinking of buying a 24" 4K but just don't want to make a mistake and have it playable for some games and not others since it's not very large #1 #2 switching between 3 monitors on the desk would prove to be cramping.
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A 4k 24" would be a mistake because you'd need a magnifying glass to use 4k on a 24" monitor. Any reason why you want to stay in 2005?
 
You can't scale up the UI in those games?

22" is the ideal for a 4K monitor since that is almost exactly 200 pixels per inch, so things should look the correct size with 2x scaling.

Anything less than 44" requires scaling, and anything in-between 22-44 requires non-integer scaling, which has problems.
 
That's the theory.

In practice, of all of the monitors I have used thus far (not including 4k, but up to 1440p), is that they don't pixel double. The monitors will apply some kind of filtering that makes the image look blurrier than an actual true 1080p monitor. So far I have not seen a single monitor that does pixel doubling.

Also, UI scaling depends very heavily on the game, and can be erratic within the same series. For example, Mass Effect 2 UI scales perfectly up to 4k, Mass effect 3 however does not scale, despite 2 scaling, and ME3 being newer. Most games scale than not, and the games that don't scale tend to be the older kind (for example, DA:O). But the game I really want UI scaling, Civ V, does not scale, though i have not looked into mods, or examined it in any detail because I literally couldn't see the text at 27" 4k.

The above 2 reasons are pretty much the biggest 'on-paper' reasons why I didn't jump to 4k. I didn't (and still don't) have any 4k monitors in my locale to even look at, so I have no idea how 4k monitor would look.

I am still looking for a 4k native monitor that can do 1080p images as a true native 1080p monitor as a side monitor, so at least I can have both the super eye-candy of a 4k screen and the performance level of 1080p screen, depending on the situation, but unfortunately, because of that filtering, I am currently inclined to use a native 1080p instead, as I am far more interested in the latter resolution than the former. In fact at this stage I would be more inclined to use either version of 21:9 than 4k...
 
chenw said:
In practice, of all of the monitors I have used thus far (not including 4k, but up to 1440p), is that they don't pixel double. The monitors will apply some kind of filtering that makes the image look blurrier than an actual true 1080p monitor. So far I have not seen a single monitor that does pixel doubling.
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Well I was talking about Windows' DPI scaling. 200 DPI monitors are intended to be used at 200% scale.

chenw said:
I am still looking for a 4k native monitor that can do 1080p images as a true native 1080p monitor as a side monitor, so at least I can have both the super eye-candy of a 4k screen and the performance level of 1080p screen, depending on the situation, but unfortunately, because of that filtering, I am currently inclined to use a native 1080p instead, as I am far more interested in the latter resolution than the former.
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Register your interest here. Hopefully we can get NVIDIA to do something about it in the driver, so you're not dependent on what the monitor does:

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/844905/integer-scaling-mode/
 
22" as a screen size is too small at any resolution.

24" at 4k is insane.

1440p at 27" even is too small IMO.
 
rive22 said:
22" as a screen size is too small at any resolution.
24" at 4k is insane.
1440p at 27" even is too small IMO.
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Monitors have been standardized at around 100 pixels per inch ±10% or so as far back as I can remember.
With the move to high resolution screens, 200 PPI is ideal, since that allows for clean 2x scaling.
Anything in-between will use non-integer scales (e.g. 1.25x, 1.50x, 1.75x) which have a lot of problems when trying to display older applications that were not built to handle scaling.

At 200 PPI with 2x scaling, objects have the same physical size on the display, but four times as much detail.
1080p at 22" and UHD at 22" will display things exactly the same size when scaling is used.

UHD at 24" is 184 PPI, which means that things will be displayed larger than a standard 100 PPI monitor if 2x scaling is used.
If you use 1.84x scaling, things will be the correct size but you will have problems running older applications.

2560x1440 at 27" is a little bit on the small side, since that's about 110 PPI instead of 100.
2560x1600 at 30" was 100 PPI, which was a lot better. I'm not sure why 1440p became popular.
 
That all makes good sense. And I agree 2560x1600 at 30" is just about right IMO.
 
Wait wait, did we ever actually get the in-game screenshot comparisons that we asked for from this same exact topic 2 threads ago?

We still have no proof that 1080p scaling on a 4K screen is really that bad inside modern games.

We do have screenshot comparisons inside of software, but that's a bit of an edge case.
 
KazeoHin said:
Wait wait, did we ever actually get the in-game screenshot comparisons that we asked for from this same exact topic 2 threads ago?
We still have no proof that 1080p scaling on a 4K screen is really that bad inside modern games.
We do have screenshot comparisons inside of software, but that's a bit of an edge case.
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No, I still haven't had an opportunity to. I have access to the high-res display here, but was planning on borrowing the low-res one for this comparison so that I could have a display of similar quality, equal size and 1/4 the resolution.
I still plan on doing it, I just don't know when I will get the opportunity. I expected it would be much sooner than this.
Thinking about it, I actually have an older TN panel which is the same size and resolution stored away somewhere that I could do the comparison with, but then there are more factors than simply the resolution at play. (color reproduction is poor on that old TN panel)

I can tell you that from having done the comparisons in person some time ago, it's an obvious improvement to use nearest neighbor scaling instead of bilinear or whatever the drivers would normally use.
Anything rendered on a PC, whether that is software or games, looks best with sharp pixels.
Video tends to look better filtered - but using proper upscaling like HDTVs have, or software like madVR.
 
chenw said:
That's the theory.

In practice, of all of the monitors I have used thus far (not including 4k, but up to 1440p), is that they don't pixel double. The monitors will apply some kind of filtering that makes the image look blurrier than an actual true 1080p monitor. So far I have not seen a single monitor that does pixel doubling.
.
Click to expand...

A monitor without scaling will pixel double, because it can not filter/scale anything:D.
My apple 30" takes 1280x800 natively using pixel doubling, and no other resolution besides the native 2560x1600.

Also even monitors with scalers can be forced to pixel double without much hassle in either GPU driver settings or OSD. My U2515H takes 1280x720 with pixel doubling and my Seiki 4k 39" takes 1920x1080 signals without a hint of filters/blurring.
 
That is the type of monitor I want just double pixels while keeping the Aspect Ratio REZ same shape and size or whatever the same as it looks on my 1080P. Part of it would be monitor related because you can't double the pixels on a monitor so you need to have a monitor will double pixels that displays the same as a 1080P.
 
geok1ng said:
A monitor without scaling will pixel double, because it can not filter/scale anything:D.
My apple 30" takes 1280x800 natively using pixel doubling, and no other resolution besides the native 2560x1600.

Also even monitors with scalers can be forced to pixel double without much hassle in either GPU driver settings or OSD. My U2515H takes 1280x720 with pixel doubling and my Seiki 4k 39" takes 1920x1080 signals without a hint of filters/blurring.
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I have never seen any thing like that on nVidia Drivers, and I have never used the monitors you mentioned. My office currently uses U2412M and it does not pixel double, or at least doesn't appear to have that option in the OSD.

This is why I am hoping either P2415Q or P2715Q have that option, but it appears neither do, which throws a complete spanner in those two monitors for me (I am not looking for any screen bigger than 27").
 
chenw said:
I have never seen any thing like that on nVidia Drivers, and I have never used the monitors you mentioned. My office currently uses U2412M and it does not pixel double, or at least doesn't appear to have that option in the OSD.
This is why I am hoping either P2415Q or P2715Q have that option, but it appears neither do, which throws a complete spanner in those two monitors for me (I am not looking for any screen bigger than 27").
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I suspect that this is the same as those people that insist that OS X's resolution scaling is perfectly sharp, instead of the blurry mess that it is.

Anything other than 1x or 2x scaling in OS X is completely unusable in my opinion.
Yet I see many people recommending the "more space" options, and the new MacBook even ships with a scaled resolution enabled by default.

P.S. I have done some preliminary testing with that old TN panel, and the results are not as bad as I thought they would be - it just takes a lot of set-up to try and get the camera at a perfect angle to the screen to avoid inversion.
So if everything goes well getting the high-res shots to compare, I will try to post images later today.
 
chenw said:
I have never seen any thing like that on nVidia Drivers, and I have never used the monitors you mentioned. My office currently uses U2412M and it does not pixel double, or at least doesn't appear to have that option in the OSD.
.
Click to expand...

You can try test images and a magnifying glass to determine whether your monitors are doing pixel doubling or scaling/filtering/messing with the signal. half resolutions pixel doubling are achieved usually by selecting " full" and " keep aspect ratio" on OSD and driver panel, and scaling/filtering is implemented when one selects "scan" or " fit to screen size".

The U2412M should pixel double 960x600 images. not that there are many fonts using that resolution natively. pretty much any game running 960x600 as a resolution will scale their textures , so what you blame as a failure of the monitor may actually be a feature of the software. the same can be said about desktop icons, which can not be rendered natively for 960x600 as well.
 
Would it be possible to buy a 4K monitor and play games at 1080p 120/144Hz? You could use the desktop at 4k and have better performance in games if it still scaled correctly. Not that maintaining a constant 144Hz/FPS is going to be an easy task either.
 
rekd0514 said:
Would it be possible to buy a 4K monitor and play games at 1080p 120/144Hz? You could use the desktop at 4k and have better performance in games if it still scaled correctly. Not that maintaining a constant 144Hz/FPS is going to be an easy task either.
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The monitor would have to support it.
Many 4K televisions that do 4K60, will also do 1080p120.

However if you're sending the display a 1080p signal, you are reliant on the display's scaling.
To scale it in the driver, you would be limited to 4K60 again.
 
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