Kodi 19 Alpha 3 Brings Intel Integer Scaling Support For Pixel Art Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Kodi 19 Alpha 3 Brings Intel Integer Scaling Support For Pixel Art Games

The third alpha release of Kodi 19 "Matrix" was released on Sunday for this popular multi-platform HTPC software...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kodi-19-Alpha-3-Released

[linuxgeex]

I don't get why they (Kodi) need to rely on the DRM driver or X11 xrandr settings to achieve this... there's this thing called "OpenGL Surface" and filter "Nearest"... hello...

I do get why it's good for Intel to bring an integer scaling mode for display upscaling. For example when upscaling a display from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 - using bilinear interpolation looks absolutely awful for text. It's fine for video and photo-realistic imagery. It's cheaper energy-wise to implement that at the DRM level, but it's way more flexible to implement it at the Compositor and/or Application level. DRM isn't going to know whether you're upscaling text or photos. Your app should.

[ssokolow]

I don't get why they (Kodi) need to rely on the DRM driver or X11 xrandr settings to achieve this... there's this thing called "OpenGL Surface" and filter "Nearest"... hello...

Unless I misunderstand the situation, this is about Kodi configuring the graphics driver's scaling settings before launching a separate process which is probably closed source, probably based on SDL, and may even be old enough to not have a Wayland backend, let alone other non-X11 backends.

...sort of like how Windows GPU driver control panels let you force per-application settings on games that don't support things like anti-aliasing or how, if I ever get back to working on it, my game launcher frontend will handle common stuff games screw up, like using Firejail to stymie their attempts to put non-hidden folders in $HOME (some games, like The Escapists, use getpwuid or getpwnam to ignore $HOME so your options are either LD_PRELOAD or cgroups), suppressing the screensaver (you'd be surprised how many games fail this when you're using only a gamepad), and setting PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 to prevent crackling audio.

[MT_ru]

Indeed, the interconnection between Intel and integer scaling in Kodi is not quite clear. Emulators typically have built-in scaling. It’s possible that there is just some confusion, so there is probably no interconnection at all, other than that integer scaling in general proved useful under Linux.