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

[paddymaxson]

I mean I'm sure AI can upscale icons pretty nicely. And even better at doing textures.

It would probably do a fine job of upscaling the icons, I don't reaslly trust it with textures though, NWN2: EE has ai uipscaled textures and in some of them the AI thought the JPEG artefacts were part of the texture so it baked them into the upscaled version

 

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

Upscaling DDO to 4K resolution involves a range of technical, artistic, and UI-related work

That would entail serious engine-level work to properly handle 3840×2160 output without stretching or distortion. They'd have to implement smart UI scaling so text, health bars, menus are legible at 4K. Higher-res textures and models require more GPU memory and bandwidth. Optimizations or engine rewrites would be needed and that would undoubtedly lead to LAG.

Worse, DDO would need an art asset overhaul. Most original DDO textures are low-res. To look good at 4K, they’d need to be remade in 2K or 4K resolution. Armor, weapons, creature skins, environment surfaces, like EVERYTHING. This alone would add T I M E, and a lot of it.
Character visuals would need serious updates for detail at 4K. Characters look blocky at 1080p. This would add immense time to the project.

Spell Effects: Particle effects, auras, and lighting need updates to avoid pixelation or visual artifacting at high resolution.

UI and Font Redesign need translation into Vector-Based UI: DDO use bitmap fonts and static UI elements. A modern 4K interface benefits from scalable vector graphics (SVG) and TrueType fonts.

HUD & Hotbar Resizing: Scaling up these elements without cluttering the screen requires a UI layout revamp—perhaps introducing customizable UI layers like in WoW or Final Fantasy XIV.

Pre-rendered videos and in-game cutscenes need to be either replaced with high-res versions. Devs would need to QA across various display sizes (27”, 32”, 40”+) to ensure the game doesn’t break at different DPI settings... compatibility with modern GPUs, ultrawide monitors, and different OS scaling settings (Windows 10/11).

Sadly epscaling DDO to 4K is not just a toggle switch—it would likely require more staff, a UI/UX team to rebuild the interface, engine devs to modernize backend rendering and a QA team to test.

I dont see an avenue for SSG here to walk down. I freakin' wish.

 

[zenman]

umm.. oh boy, Welcome to my world.

DDO's 2006 client is a legacy application trying to run on modern hardware it was never designed for. It lacks the native resolution scaling and flexible UI of modern engines. When you force a lower resolution onto a 4K screen, the scaling process (whether by your GPU or monitor) tries to "fill in the blanks," often resulting in a blurry image. If the aspect ratio isn't perfectly maintained during this process, the image appears distorted – stretched either vertically or horizontally depending on the select aspect ratio.

set your in game aspect to 4:3 or 5:4 without any scaling and you might see what to original graphics are supposed to look like.

Then the big bear in the room is that the client never had skin scaling and that is the biggest issue with scaling.

Modern games design their UI elements as vectors or high-resolution bitmaps that can be scaled independently, or they have system-level DPI awareness. DDO's UI elements are fixed-size and simply too small for 4K.

To make the old graphics work on 4k would require a rewrite of the client, but no changes to the graphic content.

Doing 4k native graphics WOULD require reworking art changes to graphic content across the game.

using external scaling tactics can make it fit on a screen, but every combination of graphic card/monitor is going to have variations, so your milage may vary.

I play on a 53 inch OLED TV @120hz and even the TV's game mode changes what I see vs what you would see on a different TV, but that has more to do with 3d effects and movement than scale


tl;dr: It's complicated... the main idea is the question of how long DDO will continue as a thing with current graphics as compared to modern games.

 

[Lacci]

Upscaling DDO to 4K resolution involves a range of technical, artistic, and UI-related work

That would entail serious engine-level work to properly handle 3840×2160 output without stretching or distortion. They'd have to implement smart UI scaling so text, health bars, menus are legible at 4K. Higher-res textures and models require more GPU memory and bandwidth. Optimizations or engine rewrites would be needed and that would undoubtedly lead to LAG.

That shouldn´t be causing any lag. The server does not care what graphics settings the client uses, network data is not affected by that, that´s all local data. And 1080p can be scaled up to 4k easily as there is no distortion involved, it´s the same aspect ratio.

Worse, DDO would need an art asset overhaul. Most original DDO textures are low-res. To look good at 4K, they’d need to be remade in 2K or 4K resolution. Armor, weapons, creature skins, environment surfaces, like EVERYTHING. This alone would add T I M E, and a lot of it.
Character visuals would need serious updates for detail at 4K. Characters look blocky at 1080p. This would add immense time to the project.

Spell Effects: Particle effects, auras, and lighting need updates to avoid pixelation or visual artifacting at high resolution.

I have to say, from my point of view, this is not needed, the ingame graphics look fine as they are when run in 4k.
That would of course require a full remaster of the game, which is not feasible I think (also not necessary).

UI and Font Redesign need translation into Vector-Based UI: DDO use bitmap fonts and static UI elements. A modern 4K interface benefits from scalable vector graphics (SVG) and TrueType fonts.

HUD & Hotbar Resizing: Scaling up these elements without cluttering the screen requires a UI layout revamp—perhaps introducing customizable UI layers like in WoW or Final Fantasy XIV.

This here is the real issue for me. Many parts of the UI are just unusable in 4k. For example, I have no idea how many AS I have. I just can´t read that tiny number. And it´s not the only one.
I´m not the youngest anymore, I don´t have pixel-perfect mouse aim. I don´t always hit for example, the tiny 1.5 mm wide up and down arrows in some of the menus.
And this is an overhaul that, imo, is absolutely necessary.

Modern games design their UI elements as vectors or high-resolution bitmaps that can be scaled independently, or they have system-level DPI awareness. DDO's UI elements are fixed-size and simply too small for 4K.

Well, not only modern games, many old games handled this pretty well. World of Warcraft is older than DDO, and their UI works fine in higher resolutions, because it can be scaled up.

 

[zenman]

That shouldn´t be causing any lag. The server does not care what graphics settings the client uses, network data is not affected by that, that´s all local data. And 1080p can be scaled up to 4k easily as there is no distortion involved, it´s the same aspect ratio.


I have to say, from my point of view, this is not needed, the ingame graphics look fine as they are when run in 4k.
That would of course require a full remaster of the game, which is not feasible I think (also not necessary).


This here is the real issue for me. Many parts of the UI are just unusable in 4k. For example, I have no idea how many AS I have. I just can´t read that tiny number. And it´s not the only one.
I´m not the youngest anymore, I don´t have pixel-perfect mouse aim. I don´t always hit for example, the tiny 1.5 mm wide up and down arrows in some of the menus.
And this is an overhaul that, imo, is absolutely necessary.


Well, not only modern games, many old games handled this pretty well. World of Warcraft is older than DDO, and their UI works fine in higher resolutions, because it can be scaled up.

depends on perspective and context, a lot of the code base for DDO was inherited from Asheron's call from 1999, before WoW, and it was the the redheaded step child to that other big name game they run that did include some primitive scaling... but that's all just semantics, the old owners were not interested in keeping it running for 20 years and never had the budget of WoW.

 

[paddymaxson]

Upscaling DDO to 4K resolution involves a range of technical, artistic, and UI-related work

That would entail serious engine-level work to properly handle 3840×2160 output without stretching or distortion. They'd have to implement smart UI scaling so text, health bars, menus are legible at 4K. Higher-res textures and models require more GPU memory and bandwidth. Optimizations or engine rewrites would be needed and that would undoubtedly lead to LAG.

Worse, DDO would need an art asset overhaul. Most original DDO textures are low-res. To look good at 4K, they’d need to be remade in 2K or 4K resolution. Armor, weapons, creature skins, environment surfaces, like EVERYTHING. This alone would add T I M E, and a lot of it.
Character visuals would need serious updates for detail at 4K. Characters look blocky at 1080p. This would add immense time to the project.

Spell Effects: Particle effects, auras, and lighting need updates to avoid pixelation or visual artifacting at high resolution.

UI and Font Redesign need translation into Vector-Based UI: DDO use bitmap fonts and static UI elements. A modern 4K interface benefits from scalable vector graphics (SVG) and TrueType fonts.

HUD & Hotbar Resizing: Scaling up these elements without cluttering the screen requires a UI layout revamp—perhaps introducing customizable UI layers like in WoW or Final Fantasy XIV.

Pre-rendered videos and in-game cutscenes need to be either replaced with high-res versions. Devs would need to QA across various display sizes (27”, 32”, 40”+) to ensure the game doesn’t break at different DPI settings... compatibility with modern GPUs, ultrawide monitors, and different OS scaling settings (Windows 10/11).

Sadly epscaling DDO to 4K is not just a toggle switch—it would likely require more staff, a UI/UX team to rebuild the interface, engine devs to modernize backend rendering and a QA team to test.

I dont see an avenue for SSG here to walk down. I freakin' wish.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Obviously people are already playing the game in 4K resolutions and the only real issue is the UI.

You don't have to redo the textures, or the models or any such thing. could DDO do with a once over of some older assets to make them better? Yeah sure, but that's not that relevant to RENDERING in 4k. Many people are already rendering in 4k. There is literally no work required to make that work at present.

People's bone of contention is simply that the UI is unusable at 4k. Yes it'd be great if everything was scalable, but the lazy route might be to just to have a 100%, 150%, 200% scaling setting and to run things through a fairly rudimentary upscaler (yes I appreciate that 150% isn't a linear upscale of the game's icons because they're 32 by 32 which means directly scaling them 150% in each dimension involves a sub pixel). I think a lot of us would just be really happy with some options, even if the only option was twice as large.

I'm usually the first person to say "That's a bigger job than you think it is" but I honestly don't think this is that big a job. All the UI Elements are moveable so it's not like you have to worry overmuch about layout and a double size in all dimensions UI would look the same in 4K as the current one does in 1080P. I'm sure there's some complexities to it that I don't know about but well....LOTRO has it, so it seems like a big **** you that DDO doesn't.

That said, Lossless scaling/magpie seem like acceptable solutions for now for most people.

I'm in the 1440p category where actually the UI is just right for me. I actually went down from 4K, not specifically for DDO, more just that 4K gaming is still a little bit nebulous even today unless you really want to rely on FSR/DLSS and want to spend a small fortune on your graphics card.

 

[Teh_Troll]

Seriously, just buy Lossless scaling. 1440P upscled to 4k looks amazing and the frame gen helps in the areas of this game that kill your video card.

 

[Teh_Troll]

 

[dejvid]

that app sure is handy, but man, what is going on with linus in that video? something feels off, his voice or his mouth movement. is he also framegenerated?

 

[rabidfox]

that app sure is handy, but man, what is going on with linus in that video? something feels off, his voice or his mouth movement. is he also framegenerated?

He just got braces.

 

[dejvid]

He just got braces.

hah, did not even notice them while watching! quality product (both the app and his braces).

 

[Deathbringer]

I use it since I discover it! Very helpful! But lately I'm having some issues with Lossless Scaling that freezes the screen... it happens too often now, only work around I found is using "Alt+Tab" and alt+tab again to get back to the game... Is someone else having this problem? I read on steam others having this problem with other games.... :confused:

 

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Obviously people are already playing the game in 4K resolutions and the only real issue is the UI.

I'm all in for a UI only fix. Tossing bitmap and upgrading to scalable vector graphics (SVG) and TrueType fonts would be welcome as long as SSG can handle such a task... I think it would still be a time consuming task but I would argue that it just might be worth it. Technology is leaving this game behind, that update would help blunt that.

 

[Alpha Tester]

I actually lower a bit the ddo resolution so I can read the chat, usually to 1680 x 1050. It's not as good as the UI scale but does the job. Ui scale is really very important specially because we have an older playerbase with tired eyesight and these days many people play on TVs, the lack of it and unplayable quests due to bad optimization was some of the reason that I got 4 years away from DDO: I paid the price of a ferrari and got a beetle.

Quests like: First one from Sharn Part 2, the boss on Saltmarch and the 3 temple quests in Dread Island: some I would play better in a gtx 750 ti than a friend in a 3070. And when players beg for a fix they launch another pack. DDO also have dozens of quests that people don't play because they are bad to reach, this was a smart move when DDO had less than 100s quests but makes no sense now that the game have almost 800 quests. A simple teleporter would do.

Also I have less lag in DDO if I cap the fps to 60 since ever.

 

[Arthuvin]

I once considered buying an old crt monitor to play ddo

 

[survient]

When you want to play the game in windowed mode on a high resolution display, I can vouch for the Magpie app over Lossless scaling for my situation. It gets rid of the title bar(plus in my case), performance is great(rtx 3080 ti for reference, I'm sure it'd be fine on older gpus), and switching windows to check something in the web browser like the wiki has no issues. I was able to scale the window after a bit of resize fine tuning to exactly the size I wanted and honestly this is the best experience I've had for this type of setup.

I tried lossless scaling but at the moment they appear to have deprecated support for Windowed mode upscaling(where the output is NOT full screen). Hopefully they re-add windowed support back; Magpie does show it can be done.

 

[Thebento]

Hey Bigj

4u test this software on ddo ?

Ty

 

[Teh_Troll]

Hey Bigj

4u test this software on ddo ?

Ty

Yes, I use it all the time. Works great.

 

[Speed]

I do not like any blur filters or AI artifacts, so I prefer "pixel perfect" solutions.
For old games I always use true lossless scaling directly by display driver (not monitor), which is free and not third party dependent.
For Radeon cards, I run standard Radeon Software, go to Display, set GPU Scaling "Enabled", Scaling Mode "Preserve Aspect Ratio" and Integer Scaling "Enabled".
Result is pure multiplied pixels that scale to native resolution without any artificial additions.

In case of monitors with high resolutions, they should have proper inch size.
If it is too low (like in small notebooks), then physical "dot pitch" (PPI, pixels per inch) is too small even for good eyes.
Distance is additional parameter.
1920 x 1080 = 24+ inch is recommended for close distance.
2560 x 1440 = 27+ inch.
3840 x 2160 = 32+ inch.

 

[Thebento]

Yes, I use it all the time. Works great.

thank you, maybe i buy to test...