Nonsteam games

[Kyo Tanaka]

Like title says, does this work on nonsteam games? Mainly asking for Zenless Zone Zero. While I can easily run it at max performance... CPU gets hot way too easily with it still getting hiccups in zones it's still loading assets in.

Heard this eases the CPU uses by putting it more on GPU. I'd love to try it myself but I hadn't bought this yet, and I'm on the fence whether it's worth it.

[Spook]

Yep, if it can render in a window, LSFG can most likely interpolate it. You can for example also interpolate Youtube videos with it, and some people use it on emulators.

[broy8]

Yes - can use it on emulators too. sky's the limit.

[Kyo Tanaka]

Originally posted by broy8:

Yes - can use it on emulators too. sky's the limit.

I knew about emulators I was just worried if it was just limited to steam.

Thanks for all the answers. I will certainly give this a go

[Space Detective]

Originally posted by Kyo Tanaka:

Originally posted by broy8:

Yes - can use it on emulators too. sky's the limit.

I knew about emulators I was just worried if it was just limited to steam.

Thanks for all the answers. I will certainly give this a go

Honest question, did you think it only worked with RetroArch? Because that is the only emulator on Steam* AFAIK.

*Well, RetroArch's not really an emulator and there's retro re-releases that use emulators, but this isn't the place to be technically correct.

[Kyo Tanaka]

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

Originally posted by Kyo Tanaka:

I knew about emulators I was just worried if it was just limited to steam.

Thanks for all the answers. I will certainly give this a go

Honest question, did you think it only worked with RetroArch? Because that is the only emulator on Steam* AFAIK.

*Well, RetroArch's not really an emulator and there's retro re-releases that use emulators, but this isn't the place to be technically correct.

Dolphin was supposed to head onto Steam once upon a time. Plus sounds like it'd benefit emulators in general in terms of resolution.

[Space Detective]

Originally posted by Kyo Tanaka:

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

Honest question, did you think it only worked with RetroArch? Because that is the only emulator on Steam* AFAIK.

*Well, RetroArch's not really an emulator and there's retro re-releases that use emulators, but this isn't the place to be technically correct.

Dolphin was supposed to head onto Steam once upon a time. Plus sounds like it'd benefit emulators in general in terms of resolution.

Not really answering the question lol, unless you're saying you expected more emulators to hit Steam.

As for the latter bit though, yeah I do plan to use LS for cases where I can't run a game above 480p or 720p in various emulators, or for those odd cases where resolution factors are only powers of two, which means normally I'd have to pick from 960p or almost 4K (which isn't really an ideal choice when I have a 1080p display and a graphics card that doesn't handle some of the more GPU-intensive emulators very well).

[Spook]

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

which means normally I'd have to pick from 960p or almost 4K (which isn't really an ideal choice when I have a 1080p display and a graphics card that doesn't handle some of the more GPU-intensive emulators very well).

DSR and intereger scaling maybe?

[Space Detective]

Originally posted by Spook:

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

which means normally I'd have to pick from 960p or almost 4K (which isn't really an ideal choice when I have a 1080p display and a graphics card that doesn't handle some of the more GPU-intensive emulators very well).

DSR and intereger scaling maybe?

I didn't do a very in-depth look into it, but I don't think DSR is an option for me. I couldn't find any DSR stuff in my Nvidia Control Panel or anything, and this is a laptop where all the video is going through the iGPU.

Not really sure what you mean by integer scaling in this context.

[Spook]

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

Not really sure what you mean by integer scaling in this context.

Integer because no performance cost and image integrity, DSR because it might fit a weird resolution that 1080p doesn't.

DSR is normally found in the "Manage 3D settings">"Global settings" menu. But it appears it only works on laptops with a MUX-switch. I was unaware.

[Space Detective]

Originally posted by Spook:

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

Not really sure what you mean by integer scaling in this context.

Integer because no performance cost and image integrity, DSR because it might fit a weird resolution that 1080p doesn't.

DSR is normally found in the "Manage 3D settings">"Global settings" menu. But it appears it only works on laptops with a MUX-switch. I was unaware.

I mean I get what integer scaling is, just I'm not sure what you're suggesting to do with it exactly. My first thoughts when hearing it are using it to border 960p on my 1080p display; which I don't think would be a big improvement (and arguably worse, since bilinear filtering I imagine would be pretty okay going from 960p to a 1080 pixels tall image) or scaling 240p to a 960 pixels tall image; which is not what I want here.
What I want is essentially the experience I can get in an emulator like DuckStation, where I can set the resolution factor to something that ends up slightly higher than 1080p (e.g. usually 240p>1200p) then have that scale down to my display, rather than having to choose between slightly lower or so much higher that my GPU can't really handle it.

Admittedly though, I'm not very familiar with DSR as a feature; I mostly think of it as the "how to get 8K on a 4K display" thing from a video I watched. If you can go the other way around and have it do a 960p or close resolution that looks nice and fills the screen without borders, that would actually make sense for this kind of use case. Too bad it isn't available on my laptop.

[Spook]

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

What I want is essentially the experience I can get in an emulator like DuckStation, where I can set the resolution factor to something that ends up slightly higher than 1080p (e.g. usually 240p>1200p) then have that scale down to my display, rather than having to choose between slightly lower or so much higher that my GPU can't really handle it.

Don't know how to make your emulator do that (don't know which emulator). But you might try adding a custom resolution for 960p in your GPU driver control panel or through CRU. Most GPUs should be able to accept and internally scale-up such a smaller than native resolution. iGPU's probably can as well.

Also, if your emulator here is Retroarch, i find it hard to image there's no option to fill to screen. As last time i used it, which is some time ago, not having enough options was not one of it's faults.

Admittedly though, I'm not very familiar with DSR as a feature; I mostly think of it as the "how to get 8K on a 4K display" thing from a video I watched.

That is essentially it. DSR allows a game to render above a screen's native resolution, which your GPU will then scale down. Very useful for resolving fine details, which 1080p with TAA/DLSS generally does not. I suggested it because it contains resolutions which will fit 240p/480p (1440p and 2160p), and i was under the impression that that's how you came to your 960p.

If you can go the other way around and have it do a 960p or close resolution that looks nice and fills the screen without borders

If you can add a 960p resolution, it will essentially do this. If you GPU allows to scale to fullscreen. Though it will be stretched, so image quality might suffer a bit.

Also, why not run windowed and use LS to scale up to your native res?

[Space Detective]

Originally posted by Spook:

Don't know how to make your emulator do that (don't know which emulator). But you might try adding a custom resolution for 960p in your GPU driver control panel or through CRU. Most GPUs should be able to accept and internally scale-up such a smaller than native resolution. iGPU's probably can as well.

I tried messing around with CRU years ago now; trying to define a 1440x1080 resolution for my monitor, and had no luck unfortunately.
I also don't see anything for defining custom resolutions in the Nvidia Control Panel or the Intel Graphics Command Center.

Also, if your emulator here is Retroarch, i find it hard to image there's no option to fill to screen. As last time i used it, which is some time ago, not having enough options was not one of it's faults.

There's been a few emulators that I've seen this "you can only upscale the resolution by factors of 2" quirk, but I was mainly thinking of N64 emulators when using the highly accurate Parallel RDP video plug-in. For some reason, N64 video plug-ins seem to be annoying with configuration, often missing options that at least I would expect.
This includes the N64 emulators in RetroArch, which also have that resolution behavior when using the Parallel RDP plug-in.

Also, yeah these emulators do obviously allow filling the screen (I don't think the non-RetroArch N64 emulators I looked at even have integer scaling support, strangely enough), I just think it'd probably look nicer to scale e.g. 1200p>1080p than 960p>1080p.

Also, why not run windowed and use LS to scale up to your native res?

That is exactly what I said I want to do earlier, in post 6. You were kind of the one who brought up less simple alternatives like DSR lol.
Not that I'd be against trying stuff like that to see if the results are any better than LS1, but well, it seems I can't on this laptop.

It feels like there's been some confusion, which I apologize for; my usage of the "upscaling" terminology in relation to upping the resolution probably didn't help. Apologies if this is a bit patronizing/condescending, but to try to make things crystal:

The emulators I use don't allow defining arbitrary resolutions for rendering a game at. What they do instead is let you up the original resolution up by an integer, e.g. 2x for twice the game's original resolution, 3x for three times and so on (some do half-integers too, but that's less safe than integers so I usually avoid it). The end result is then scaled to fit the display or window with some kind of filter, with fullscreen still running at the same resolution as your display; just with the game content at a different rendering resolution.
The reason I was talking about 960p is that it comes from, well, 240p being scaled by 4x or 480p by 2x. It doesn't have anything to do with integer scaling of the display, it's just the closest these emulators let you get to 1080p rendering without going over, and in the case of Parallel RDP or emulators that only do powers of 2, you end up in a position where the resolution selection leaps straight from 960p to 1920p; nearly 4K without anything in-between. This is not only silly, but leads to my issue where Parallel RDP is GPU-intensive enough that x8 is too heavy and leads to slow-downs on my GPU, while 4x doesn't actually let me make the most of my 1080p display. A 5x option for 1200p would be ideal, but 5 isn't a power of 2, so I'm left in the cold.

So yeah, my issue in short is: The N64 emulator video plug-in I use due to reasons I don't know about has nothing in-between sub-1080p and a resolution slightly removed from 4K, and with my GPU not really up to the task of highly accurate N64 graphics emulation at 4K this puts me in an uncomfortable area where I have to scale 960p up to my 1080p display in some way, rather than let the emulator scale something higher than 1080p down to that, which I'm capable of doing in most other cases and I would imagine would produce nicer results.

[Spook]

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

I tried messing around with CRU years ago now; trying to define a 1440x1080 resolution for my monitor, and had no luck unfortunately.
I also don't see anything for defining custom resolutions in the Nvidia Control Panel or the Intel Graphics Command Center.

If you've got a 720p resolution on your system, chances are 960p may work, worth a shot with CRU i'd say. You can use HRC or a secondary monitor to get yourself out of binds.

It feels like there's been some confusion, which I apologize for; my usage of the "upscaling" terminology in relation to upping the resolution probably didn't help. Apologies if this is a bit patronizing/condescending, but to try to make things crystal: [...] while 4x doesn't actually let me make the most of my 1080p display.

No need to apologize.

If i were in your position, i'd see if i really couldn't get LS to work. And if not, i'd just accept the black borders, if backlight-bleeding wasn't too bad, and enjoy my square pixels.

Forbidden thought; How nice would it be if LS worked as a virtual monitor that could be rendered to at arbitrary/custom resolutions higher then native. To then be scaled down again to desktop res.

[Space Detective]

Originally posted by Spook:

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

I tried messing around with CRU years ago now; trying to define a 1440x1080 resolution for my monitor, and had no luck unfortunately.
I also don't see anything for defining custom resolutions in the Nvidia Control Panel or the Intel Graphics Command Center.

If you've got a 720p resolution on your system, chances are 960p may work, worth a shot with CRU i'd say. You can use HRC or a secondary monitor to get yourself out of binds.

Yeeeeeeah, thing is that by "had no luck" I meant CRU literally did nothing on my laptop. It didn't even break my monitor or anything, I just never saw the new resolutions I defined with it anywhere, no matter if I restarted my computer or not.
It's possible I was just missing something, but I'm not really inclined to go redownload it and toy around with it at this moment.

If i were in your position, i'd see if i really couldn't get LS to work. And if not i'd just accept the black borders, if backlight-bleeding wasn't too bad, and enjoy my square pixels.

I'm 99% sure LS will work fine. The 1% is error margin for how N64 emulators have been finicky and quirky in my experience.
It's mostly just I haven't gotten to trying using LS1 to upscale 960p to 1080p, because, uh, I haven't really felt like emulating anything lately lol, N64 games or not. Maybe I could throw LS1 at Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time some time just to try things out, or SoulCalibur III which has been a problem game for me in PCSX2.

Forbidden thought; How nice would it be if LS worked as a virtual monitor that could be rendered to at arbitrary/custom resolutions higher then native. To then be scaled down again to desktop res.

I'd love something like this for the PC ports of the classic Resident Evil games. I think those games hold up better when downsampled from some arbitrarily high resolution to the same resolution as the pre-rendered backgrounds, but the PC ports even with fan-patches don't have an option for doing something like this unfortunately.
DuckStation the PS1 emulator does let me do this with the original PS1 versions, which is partly why I prefer those even with the fan-patch improvements and PC-exclusive content in mind.

[Spook]

Originally posted by I <3 SAO:

Yeeeeeeah, thing is that by "had no luck" I meant CRU literally did nothing on my laptop.

That's quite amazing. I've never had do CRU do absolutely nothing, even on my laptop. Just monitors refusing to do what i was trying to make them. Must be a laptop thing.