Retro game scaling: Intel follows Nvidia's lead

At Gamescom in August, Nvidia released the «Gamescom Game Ready Driver». In addition to more performance and an ultra-low latency mode, Nvidia also offers a scaling technique to make fuzzy old games look crisp even at resolutions of 1080p and higher. Unfortunately, this so-called «integer scaling» is only available for Turing GPUs.

Intel follows up: «Retro Scaling»

Now Intel has released a new graphics driver that brings the same scaling technology with it. Intel, however, changed the label to «retro scaling». And as with Nvidia, unfortunately not all customers will benefit from it. The driver is for Gen11 iGPUs, which are only used in Ice Lake chips. As we reported, the first Ice Lake chips with 10 nm production technology will be rolled out starting in autumn. But currently only for energy-saving notebooks. Faster Ice-Lake processors, especially for desktop use, won't follow until 2020 or 2021.

Integer and Retro scaling

If you play an old 2D game without «Integer» or «Retro scaling» in a high resolution, it'll look blurry. Thanks to the system, the image becomes sharp and pixelated again.

This scaling technique is also known as «Nearest Neighbour Interpolation». It multiplies each pixel by an integer. When you play an old game on Full HD resolution, each original pixel becomes 4 new pixels with the same colour value. This preserves the integrity and clarity of the original signal.

If you want to use the scaling method without a suitable graphics chip and driver, then you certainly can. Not without appropriate additional software, however.