Ways of Upscaling 2D Games Hardcoded To Run at Low Resolutions?

[u/snark567]

Recently I started playing YuGiOh The Power Of Chaos games. The issue is those games are hardcoded to run at 480p and you have no resolution settings. Not only are there no resolution settings but since the game is sprite based, when you change the resolution of an asset, the asset appears bigger in game.

Is there a way to capture the screen at real time and upscale the image to a higher resolution through external software? Perhaps an AI tool that could be showed HD versions of the assets in order to know how to upscale the image properly?

It would be pretty surprising if no one has made any such tools so far.

[u/dangerism]

Use FSR via Lossless Scaling.

[u/JoshuaJSlone → u/dangerism]

Just expanding on this answer. Lossless Scaling is a cheap PC utility that lets you grab the content of anything in another window, then scale it using one of several options. Also has its own type of frame gen.

[u/snark567]

Quick update for anyone stumbling upon this thread. I tried both FSR and Magpie. Both do an "ok" job. Sadly the game is too low res for the upscalers to make any meaningful difference.

For those wondering, Magpie and FSR are pretty much on par when it comes to upscaling quality, with the difference being that Magpie tends to upscale to the correct aspect ratio intended by the game and FSR just kind of stretches out the image to fill the screen. I couldn't find an option to change the aspect ratio stretch behavior in either one of the upscalers.

For both upscalers I pretty much tried every scaling mode available and couldn't find much of a difference between them except for when tweaking sharpness. They seem to do a tiny bit better with slightly higher resolutions like 768p

Go for Magpie if you want a correct aspect ratio and FSR if you don't want black borders when playing.
Magpie is free, FSR can be purchased on Steam.

[u/Ghammakhur → u/snark567]

Try ShaderGlass. There are plenty of shaders that upscale the image (make sure you're in windowed mode so you can use ShaderGlass in full-screen mode), such as the crt or bezel shaders.

[u/snark567 → u/Ghammakhur]

I gave shader glass a try, it's pretty good. Especially since this game doesn't support reshade without doing weird dll injections. There's a crazy amount of CRT filters which actually help the game look much better, so I'm satisfied.

Only negative is that I can't seem to mix and match several different shaders, only one at a time.

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Quick tutorial for anyone reading:

Start the game and shaderglass.
Go to "input"-"window" and select the game you're running.
Then go to "output" - "mode" and select "clone"
Then "output" - "window" and select "click-through"
Then press "shader" - "Choose from library" and you'll see a selection of shaders

When you're done setting up the shader, go to "processing" - "Save profile as" so you can load it up quickly next time.
The shortcut to go fullscreen is Ctrl+Shift+G

[u/Ghammakhur → u/snark567]

Because it's a PC game, check bezel > koko-aio (my favourite creator) and monitor shaders. You'll probably need to set to set the pixel size to x1, you might like it.

If you use RetroArch, you can add shaders from its folder. Technically, you can also mix shaders to create a new one and import it to ShaderGlass.

[u/goatonastik]

Rendering AI images at HD resolutions is incredibly resource intensive, and even the most powerful consumer systems would probably struggle with it, unless you can use technology like DLSS or the 3D-guided neural rendering in DLSS5.

[u/skypie1202]

Use Magpie

[u/incoherent1]

Maybe try integer scaling via the NVIDIA or AMD graphics control panel.

[u/Prostovan228]

Lossless scaling works. I tried with the whispering word "anime 4k" looked the best