running old games at 1080p

[frozentundra123456]

Hi all

I just got with the times and bought a 1080p monitor. However, I still like to play some older games. I an noticing that when an older game is run at 1080p, the text and some stat windows are blurry and difficult to read. For instance in Titan Quest, the quests and labels on the items on the ground are very difficult to read, as they are quiet small and also the text is not clear. I am also having the same problem in Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. The textures look fine, it is just that text and interface windows are difficult to read.

Is there any way to avoid this, or is something wrong with my system? Would it be better to run at a lower resolution, even though the game runs fine 1080p?

 

[postmortemIA]

Probably lots of stuff does not upscale very well. In order for fonts to scale, they would have to be built as vectors. Many games suffer from same fate. As long as you're sure you're actually running on 1920x1080 and not something else.

Also take a look at Widescreen Gaming Forum:
http://www.wsgf.org/dr/titan-quest

 

[KingFatty]

Have you tried using a lower resolution setting in the game, say 640x480, and then just letting your monitor enlarge the size to fit the full monitor with black bars on the sides? Could try that to see if it helps as a compromise to improve the text quality (though slightly degrading the appearance of the textures)?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Have you tried using a lower resolution setting in the game, say 640x480, and then just letting your monitor enlarge the size to fit the full monitor with black bars on the sides? Could try that to see if it helps as a compromise to improve the text quality (though slightly degrading the appearance of the textures)?

Yea, I will try that. Dont think I will have to go that low though. I seem to recall 1440x900 looked ok on my old monitor.

Kind of disappointing though to find out the older games dont really benefit that much from a high res monitor.

 

[Saffron]

Think of it this way:

If you stream a video on youtube that is at 240p and make it go full screen it looks horrible. When going from a lower resolution to a higher resolution, pixelations occurs, it becomes blocky/blurry. The same thing applies with older games. They were designed at a lower resoltuion so when forced into a higher resolution they look that way.

There is almost no way around it. You can search the game website and see if they have a patch that may fix the issue, but I would say it's a long shot in the least.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Think of it this way:

If you stream a video on youtube that is at 240p and make it go full screen it looks horrible. When going from a lower resolution to a higher resolution, pixelations occurs, it becomes blocky/blurry. The same thing applies with older games. They were designed at a lower resoltuion so when forced into a higher resolution they look that way.

There is almost no way around it. You can search the game website and see if they have a patch that may fix the issue, but I would say it's a long shot in the least.

Yes,this is true I guess. Especially with Titan Quest, it is amazing how good the textures look and how lousy the text and character/quest windows look at 1080p though. There is a graphics option for 1920 x 1080, but I guess even then the pixel density is just not good enough to make text clear at that res.