Baldur's Gate Beamdog's Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 Enhanced Editions

[agris]

I never liked the widescreen mod. It makes everything so tiny and you can barely make out all the sprites details and animations.

It looks just good enough at 1360x768 on my 4K display, so a good value for a 1080 display should be around 1280x800.

Exactly, and you don't have to deal with zooming and blur filters in the EEs.

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is something important I forgot to mention though - for the best results go to your nvidia control panel, "Adjust desktop size and position" and under "Select a scaling mode" select "Full screen", perform scaling on GPU, and check "Override the scaling mode set by games and programs". This will help against possible squished image or distorted proportions.

 

[ga♥]

I never understood widescreen mod as well, everything is just too small. I used to play it at 640x480 on my 1080p LCD.
I also actually wanted to downgrade IWD2 to 640x480 but seems its not possible, until at least gemRB starts working with it.

 

[Pequod]

I never understood widescreen mod as well

Its made for widescreen monitors... You dont like stretching or black bars left and right? Go 1280:800. No bars. More LOS.
640*480 is rosy glasses or autism tbh.
1024, 100HZ crt masterrace.

perform scaling on GPU

You played yourself. Because this is 100% certain bilinear scaling that introduces the same blur EE does.
The better option is letting your panel do the scaling, as per default, and chose a "good" resolution. For example my 1900x1200 panel does not like 1280x800/960, its blurry, a bit. 1024x748 is crispy but stretched.

If someone is gay enough to play EE, he could actually reduce the blur significantly with ReShade!
LumaSharpen filter, with strength upped to 2, or AdaptiveSharpen, which is a bit too strong by default, let you look at a good old crispy image, just like in your memory...

I even tried to apply SMAA in IWD1 to try and soften the edges on the characters. With custom settings for edge detection and strength but its either not selective enough or not aggressive enough to be effective. Or maybe the edges are too short.

 

[Average Manatee]

You should avoid blurring if you can get the zoom level so that it's at 1:1 or 1:2 (for those who don't like small things). It's the inbetween ratios that require blur, e.g. at 2:3 you're spreading 2 pixels that the game wants to display across 3 screen pixels, requiring them to be averaged together. I'm pretty sure the EEs have an option to lock at 1:1 zoom but I don't know if 1:2 is possible or easy to achieve.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You played yourself. Because this is 100% certain bilinear scaling that introduces the same blur EE does.

No. Looks just fine, no blur.

 

[Pequod]

Fact > Feeling
Nvidia's GPU scaling is 100% bilinear. Ergo blur.

 

[Pequod]

I'm pretty sure the EEs have an option to lock at 1:1 zoom but I don't know if 1:2 is possible or easy to achieve.

They lie.
'Zoom lock' is the option and either goes with 'Scale interface' or without. With scaling you get a closer picture and its actually zoomed in and blurry. Without interface scaling you get, imo, the native resolution the game runs at, eg 1900x1200.

Zoom lock ON comparison
Left is with 'Interface scaling' on
Right is without.

Left is blur. Bilinear blur. You can see it even with triple png recompression artifucks applied.
And its not from the zoom of the program used or the little bit of difference in zoom.

Right is basically how the game is supposed to look but its not enjoyable at 1900x1200.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Fact > Feeling
Nvidia's GPU scaling is 100% bilinear. Ergo blur.

Well, I just tested it with both settings - GPU and Display. Absolutely no difference. I am playing 1280x800 which is then scaled to 3840x2160. No blur, aspect ratio is maintained, nothing looks elongated or squished. I don't know why you insist on telling me what I see with my own eyes.

P.S. You realize I'm not playing the EE?

Left is blur. Bilinear blur. You can see it even with triple png recompression artifucks applied.

PNG is a lossless compression format.

 

[CptMace]

Hum... oh yeah, yeah big difference indeed. Day and night basically.

 

[existential_vacuum]

PNG Police officer existential_vacuum, what's going on here?

Left is blur. Bilinear blur. You can see it even with triple png recompression artifucks applied.

Sir, you have your first warning, upon second you will be deta..

Joined: Jan 22, 2018

PNG Protocol #L055L355 violation, cuff 'im.

 

[Pequod]

I captured PNG lossy.
Now lossless.
Same setup for EE.
Left is 'zoom lock' with 'interface scaling'
Right is 'zoom lock' without 'interface scaling'
Both at 1900x1200.
Right is how the game is supposed to look.

Ill be back with GPU scaling test. I dunno why AwesomeButton claims, it doesnt blur when it official that its bilinear. Maybe its because the blow up is more than x2...

 

[AwesomeButton]

Or maybe it's because I'm not playing the EE. Just saying.

I capture PNG lossy.

I may be telling you something obvious, but if you are resizing your screencap after you've pasted it, of course it will get blurry. But after you save it as a PNG, every pixel you saved will show the color you saved it with. That's what's lossless compression.

How do you make the screenshots?

 

[Pequod]

I'm not resizing. It just gets blurred by lossy compression to save size. https://github.com/foobaz/lossypng

I cannot capture what my GPU produces on screen after scaling.
OBS looks like that but its not the blur I am seeing on my screen...

 

[AwesomeButton]

Interesting, didn't know about this program. I still don't get why would you run your screenshot through lossypng if size is not a concern, since you are then uploading it to imgur.

 

[Theldaran]

The EEs are a scam since we paid them to save effort with mods, but it turns out the mods are better. So.

 

[agris]

regarding the EEs, beamdog staunchly refuses to let us set the game resolution. also, they don't know how to implement scaling of the UI elements. using the widescreen mod to set a resolution that lets you appreciate the art for your size / aspect ratio monitor is definitely the superior choice, as long as it's aspect-ratio correct. FYI AwesomeButton you should try a perfect 1:4 mapping for your HD display: try 960x540. It'll blow everything up, but you might like the lack of subpixel rendering and the text crispness. You'll have to add this resolution to your display driver, but just google your tech (nvidia/amd) and you'll see how to do it.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Yeah nobody forces you to use 4K resolutions with Widescreen mod. I have it at 1280x1024 and that's working great for me. Going higher makes everything too small. Remember that you can run Setup-Widescreen.exe as many times as you want.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

 

[CptMace]

I haven't played the game, but I heard the story is good. Therefore, I naturally can't recommend it.
The unfathomable depths of a goon's logic.

 

[Apostle Hand]

Let me then say also in this tread that I think that EE games are superior to original ones in almost every aspect.

 

[Delterius]

Let me then say also in this tread that I think that EE games are superior to original ones in almost every aspect.

wrong thread

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/trigger-the-codex-with-a-statement.112015/

 

[janior]

praise beamdog, saviours of classic rpgs

 

[fantadomat]

Scraping the barrel,i see.

 

[Apostle Hand]

cool, one more evidence of how awesome beamdog is.