this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
146 points (95.6% liked)
PC Gaming
15320 readers
202 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah i tried playing the new halo on 720p "the bad way", and yeah it was pretty bad. I'm better of just continuing using DLSS performance mode.
I'm curious, why do you want to use upscaling on games that are easy to run? Are you using really old hardware or are the games more demanding than one might think?
No, I'm using pixel-perfect upscaling on 2D titles like FTL, because it simply looks better that way.
Here's a comparison between the built-in scaler and using integer scaling with Lossless Scaling (but any other tool that supports integer scaling would have the same result):
Built-in upscaling from 720p to 1440p.
Integer scaling (one pixel gets turned into four without any blending).
A tool that allows you to see the difference even on a small screen, with various options, including a slider:
https://twinlens.app/compare?share=2c26f762ee78
As you can see, it's the difference between blurry, mushed-up pixels and dull colors (since they get blended between pixels) vs. crisp, bright and much more pleasant to look at pixel art. It doesn't work this way with every game, of course: For my 1440p screen (2560x1440), a game needs to be 720p (1280x720 - exactly half as many pixels on each axis) for pixel-perfect scaling.
It should also be noted that in my opinion at least, this method only makes sense for modern 2D games that are designed for flat screen displays. With old games intended for CRTs, it makes more sense to use a good CRT shader instead. More info on this here.
By the way, this was very annoying to capture. Steam only took 720p screenshots of the integer-scaled image, as did two other screenshot tools I tried. I had to manually upscale the second screenshot using nearest-neighbor scaling (same thing as integer scaling) to simulate what it looks like.