Improved scaling beyond 1080p

How to use Lossless Scaling or Magpie to alleviate the game's internal 1080p resolution cap.

Preamble

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From what I can tell, Tactics Ogre: Reborn renders everything out only at 1080p. This makes playing at 1440p annoying since everything will be scaled up using bilinear filtering, making the entire game look overly soft. Using an upscaling program to handle upscaling can produce much better results; I'll be going over how to set this up, which will hopefully work as a good solution until proper resolution unlocking mods are possible.

Software

This guide will mainly be focused on "Lossless Scaling", a paid-for program that has the ideal functionality for this. A free alternative exists called "Magpie", which can achieve similar functionality.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/

https://github.com/Blinue/Magpie/releases/tag/v0.9.1

There is also a pre-release version of Magpie currently that might better support this with per-game profiles, but it doesn't have language options and is only in Chinese. Install the program of your choice.

In-game Settings

Before anything else, open the game and set it to run in a 1920x1080 window. If you'll be playing with a mouse, also go to the control settings and set Mouse Sensitivity to 35.

Configuring Lossless Scaling

Open Lossless Scaling, and create a new profile pointing to Tactics Ogre: Reborn's executable. You can find where this is by going to Steam, right-clicking on the game, and selecting "Browse local files"

You will want to turn auto scale on in Lossless Scaling, and set a delay of at least 3 seconds. Increase this if you only see a small corner of the screen after the upscaling happens.

In your new game profile, set the scaling type to "Anime4K". You're free to experiment with different scaling types, but I find this one works best both for keeping sprites sharp and making UI elements smooth.

One other setting to change is toggling the "Legacy capture API" under rendering options. This prevents the system cursor from popping up. From there, you should be good to go.

Setting up Magpie

Magpie is much simpler to set up, but it cannot (currently) apply the scaling fully automatically.

Start Magpie, and set the scaling to Anime4K. Then go to the settings and have it restore full-screen when the game is alt-tabbed out of. Then you should only have to enable the scaling with a hotkey once each time you turn on your computer.

There is a version of Magpie in pre-release currently that may add per-game profiles similar to Lossless Scaling. It's all in Chinese though, and I can't read Chinese, so I can't confirm.

Resolutions BEYOND 1440p?

one last thing; If you're playing at 4K, you can follow similar steps. Just set the in-game mouse sensitivity to 25, and try out either Integer scaling or any other methods that might look better with the clean 2X upscale. I don't have a 4K monitor myself, so I'll leave it at that.

[Steel]

Next best thing for me was to set it to exclusive fullscreen 1080p. That way I get the monitor's scaling which somehow looks sharper than the game one.

[Steel]

This isn't playing well with my freesync monitor. If I don't turn on the VRR option in lossless sync it stays at 144hz and freesync doesn't activate, if I turn that option on I get input delay plus stuttering every second as it jumps from 60hz to 144hz and back.
No go for me unfortunately.

[SleepyTimeTea😴]

Thank you! I used your instructions for Lossless Scaling to upscale it to 4k and the game looks great on my 4k monitor with the same settings you shared here. 😄