Lossless Scaling app & DDO (running DDO at 1080p full screen on 4k desktop)

rabidfox

rabidfox

The People's Champion
DDO and game scaling is a pain. If I run the game at 1080p, I find the icon sizes, text, and everything is just right. If I run it at 4k, then icons/text are way too tiny. I like running my desktop/web browser/other apps at 4k so I can fit a bunch of stuff on my screen. So I had been limited to these choices:
1) Run the desktop at 4k and DDO fullscreen at 1080p - tabbing between the game and other apps is annoying and slow
2) Run the desktop & DDO (windowed fullscreen) at 4k - DDO's icons/text too small. Can tab between the game/other stuff fast.
3) Run the desktop & DDO (windowed fullscreen) at 1080p - DDO looks great. Not as much other stuff on my screen realestate when tabbing out (but tabbing is fast)
4) ??? Profit.

Thanks to @Eunostos and messing around with https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/ I just setup a 4th option that pretty solid. I can now run my desktop at 4k and DDO in windowed (not fullscreen) mode at 1920x1080. Lossless scaling then upscales the game to fill the entire screen when the game is on top and puts it back as non-scaled window when I tab out. The game is still at 1080p but it's filling the entire 4k monitor. I captured this video on my phone to show how smooth it was tabbing in and out of the game like this:

https://imgur.com/a/F1b2yuG

Figured this might be of interest to others too given DDOs lack of handling high res scaling well.
 
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Eunostos

Well-known member
Lets see if i can figure hosting out, here's the pictures I took while getting results I think people are looking for while fox and i were figuring this out:
Edit: Note that you'll get crisper results than me going 1080p -> 4k. Ultrawides are suboptimal for fullscreen scaling like this because it's not a tidy multiple of 1080.

https://imgur.com/tVobKcb
https://imgur.com/0yPwPS7
https://imgur.com/vqnwDA4
 
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Lori

Lori

Well-known member
I can't tell from looking at the pics and video how blurry or not blurry it is.
And I'm not paying to find out.
I can play at 1920x1080 and "upscale" but the rendered output is blurry, not as crisp as when renderd at native resolution.
Same at 2560x1440. Eye fatigue is bad.
I can of course also let the monitor do the scaling, which results in a smaller image, also not what's desired.
At native 4k the renders output is fine but the text is too small to read while playing laid back.
And I hate it, ever time someone writes something I have to lean forward to read it.
So annoying, or when someone wants to join the group, lean forward to read if the level is acceptable.
 
rabidfox

rabidfox

The People's Champion
Lori said:
I can't tell from looking at the pics and video how blurry or not blurry it is.
Click to expand...
It looks way better to me than if I run the game at 1080p fullscreen and letting the monitor upscale. Obviously not as good as running DDO at 4k native where it's got way more pixels being used for the render and no scaling happening. I wasn't noticing any real blur, but people are very subjective about what they like/dislike. I tried to grab a screenshot for you, but it kept just grabbing the unscaled resolution (1920x1080) in the saved image so I'd have to try some other screenshot capture tool to see if I can get one at 4k after the upscaling is applied.
 
paddymaxson

paddymaxson

Deliberately obtuse
Something looks a little odd about it in Eunostos' photograph, like there's a smoothing filter on it to me, the text doesn't look just upscaled, it looks like it's dynamically anti-aliased. Which is fine I guess, but if it does that to the game in general I know I'd hate how it looks.

At the same time I actually went back from 4k to 1440p (I was a very early 4k adopter when even having 2 high end graphics cards got you like 30FPS in at the time modern games in 4k) which is fine for me in DDO.

Edit: in your video too now I've watched it full screen it feels a little bit like there's additional data being added rather than just doing the obvious for 1080p to 2160p - making each pixel 4 pixels. Your mileage may vary but I find that sort of thing needs to be super subtle for me to be OK with it.

edit again: Absolutely not saying don't use this or anything like that, if it helps, I actually think its a real shame there's no UI scaling in DDO given its aging player base it's kind of pitiable that this very important accessibility feature is missing. Just I don't likes the aesthetics of it.
 
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rabidfox

rabidfox

The People's Champion
paddymaxson said:
Something looks a little odd about it in Eunostos' photograph, like there's a smoothing filter on it to me, the text doesn't look upscaled, it looks like it's dynamically anti-aliased. Which is fine I guess, but if it does that to the game in general I know I'd hate how it looks.

At the same time I actually went back from 4k to 1440p (I was a very early 4k adopter when even having 2 high end graphics cards got you like 30FPS in at the time modern games in 4k) which is fine for me in DDO.
Click to expand...
I'm upscaling from 1080p to 4k so it's a straight up mathmatically easy way to scale (it's exactly 2x the width and height for number of pixels). Eunostos has an ultrawide and so the math there isn't a direct multiple. I also see 10 different upscaling methods (what algorithm is used) in the app; so I don't know what all each one does yet. There's a bunch of youtube videos about the app itself from people using it in different ways; it's what got me interested in wanting to try it out in DDO. I was happy with the results myself and figured I'd share them here, but if I wasn't then I'd have just used the 2 hour refund period on Steam. I'd rather DDO simply had native icon/text scaling at 4k, but it's really just a matter of jumping thru hoops like this app in hopes of find the best possible/acceptable solution for DDO's limitations (and lossless scaling might not be that for some folks).
 
rabidfox

rabidfox

The People's Champion
paddymaxson said:
Edit: in your video too now I've watched it full screen it feels a little bit like there's additional data being added rather than just doing the obvious for 1080p to 2160p - making each pixel 4 pixels. Your mileage may vary but I find that sort of thing needs to be super subtle for me to be OK with it.
Click to expand...
You'd probably want to use 'nearest neighbor' for each pixel getting turned into 4.
bXyPxyv.png

YVQJ5n3.png


paddymaxson said:
edit again: Absolutely not saying don't use this or anything like that, if it helps, I actually think its a real shame there's no UI scaling in DDO given its aging player base it's kind of pitiable that this very important accessibility feature is missing. Just I don't likes the aesthetics of it.
Click to expand...
I really have no interest in getting others to use or not use this app either. Up until very recently I'd never heard of it and wanted to see if covered my needs. Hopefully it gives at least a couple folks another option to deal with DDO's scaling issues until someday (maybe, yeah, sure, okay) that SSG makes the UI and stuff scale.
 
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Eunostos

Well-known member
paddymaxson said:
Something looks a little odd about it in Eunostos' photograph, like there's a smoothing filter on it to me, the text doesn't look just upscaled, it looks like it's dynamically anti-aliased. Which is fine I guess, but if it does that to the game in general I know I'd hate how it looks.

At the same time I actually went back from 4k to 1440p (I was a very early 4k adopter when even having 2 high end graphics cards got you like 30FPS in at the time modern games in 4k) which is fine for me in DDO.

Edit: in your video too now I've watched it full screen it feels a little bit like there's additional data being added rather than just doing the obvious for 1080p to 2160p - making each pixel 4 pixels. Your mileage may vary but I find that sort of thing needs to be super subtle for me to be OK with it.

edit again: Absolutely not saying don't use this or anything like that, if it helps, I actually think its a real shame there's no UI scaling in DDO given its aging player base it's kind of pitiable that this very important accessibility feature is missing. Just I don't likes the aesthetics of it.
Click to expand...
upscaling to an ultrawide is always iffy, the proportions are off (let alone a photo in poor lighting, it was more for scale than detail). So we're lucky it looks fine on them to begin with instead of becoming a game for ants. xD
 
Lori

Lori

Well-known member
Youtube supports 4k.
You could record and upload a video, doesn't have to be long.
30s of not moving, 30s of movement. Or maybe windowed the same with windowed and full screen,
so there's an equal part of standing still and movement in each windowed and full screen.

The things you think about when laying in bed.

Idk how much quality gets lost with x264 or h265.
When I stream it's never 1:1 quality, there are always artifacts,
likewise when I use Moonlight to stream from my main computer to a thin client,
it's lossy with blurry bits.

OH! There's an open source alternative
I haven't tried it yet.
But seriously,SSG should just freaking go ahead and make their game viable for 4k displays, instead of us having to sc rew around with side wheels
 
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Lyrin

Eberron Scholar
My graphics card comes with a scale up feature that works "okay". I'm not discouraging folks from trying to find 4k solutions, but life would be so much better if the devs just implemented UI scaling =)

The more threads discussing the 4k issue the better, though.
 
Oliphant

Oliphant

Well-known member
Sev said biggest obstacle for UI scaling up is paying for all the art assets to be updated. But couldn't they just focus on bigger fonts? Larger icons would be nice, but unnecessary, and maybe they would not even be so nice - having more real screen real estate is the main draw for higher resolution for me - why scale the icons and thus the hotbars anway?
 
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Lyrin

Eberron Scholar
When your hotbars are 1/4 the size, most folks struggle to easily identify them. If you're like me, you also struggle to mouse over the correct buttons when they're teeny tiny.

Take your cell phone and section off a quarter of it with your fingers, then imagine trying to do everything you normally do with that amount of space. best comparison I can offer.
 
Greyhawk5

Greyhawk5

Was Amorais
Been asking for UI scaling for about 13 of the 19 year lifespan of the game. I've never got a single response from any developer about it, so safe to say it will never happen. Despite being a day one feature of LoTRO
 
Teh_Troll

Teh_Troll

Master of Baiting
BTW . . . been using this for almost a month. It's fantastic. Running 1440p upscalled to 4K with frame gen enabled. I can't feel any additional latency and the frame-rate never falls below the refresh rate of the monitor.

Great product, best $7 I've ever spent.
 
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Eunostos

Well-known member
Quite! It's this good for all but the most razor-edge latency sensitive games - which the MMO paradigm will never be. (percieved) Performance on new games and helping with all sorts of legacy issues on old ones (like this UI). It's been sitting in my library for ... forever... before the chat about UI scaling prompted me to leverage it properly.
 
koriolis

koriolis

New member
Oliphant said:
Sev said biggest obstacle for UI scaling up is paying for all the art assets to be updated. But couldn't they just focus on bigger fonts? Larger icons would be nice, but unnecessary, and maybe they would not even be so nice - having more real screen real estate is the main draw for higher resolution for me - why scale the icons and thus the hotbars anway?
Click to expand...
I mean I'm sure AI can upscale icons pretty nicely. And even better at doing textures.
 
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