Stardew Valley is a charming game, and it's a shame to lose so much of that charm by running it at a high resolution. We can see and appreciate all of the pixel art throughout the game. Simulated integer scaling using nearest neighbor scaling Let's start off with our display's native 2560x1440 resolution. We skipped the video capture this time so we could focus on playing on a high-resolution monitor. The result is we see more, but it feels more distant, and it's harder to appreciate those chunky pixels if they've been slimmed down too far. In contrast, we've also included the full native resolution of our 1440p display, where the controls and other art assets are a quarter of the size. Still this will give you an idea of how Stardew Valley looks on a 1440p monitor with integer scaling enabled. Just like FTL, we had to simulate integer scaling since filling a 1440p display is more than our budget-level capture card could handle. We feel like 720p is the resolution where Stardew Valley looks the best, and integer scaling can help. The benefit to a higher resolution is that you can see a larger area of the screen, but the downside is that everything gets really tiny. Because you can set any resolution you want in the game's menu, Stardew Valley always looks crisp and sharp on any display, but higher resolution displays just resize the assets. It's also built for high-resolution displays in a way that FTL isn't. This chilled-out time sink will have you whiling away the days by planting and cultivating crops, pulling weeds, and selling your harvest. The game is a little high-resolution to be full-on retro, but the sharper graphics still do it justice.įarming simulator Stardew Valley is a love letter to the Harvest Moon series, right down to the premise in which you're an inexperienced farmer who inherited property from your grandfather. The simulated nearest-neighbor scaling should give you an idea how much sharper the image would be on a 1440p display with its 2x scale in both directions. With these full-resolution crops of FTL, you can see that the default scaling method adds the same kind of fuzz to the image that it has all throughout our testing. Choosing the regular Full Screen option would normally be your best bet on 1080p since it upscales better in the engine than it does after the fact.įTL with simulated integer scaling (nearest neighbor, click to see full size) For integer scaling, the best solution is to choose the Full Screen Native setting in the Options menu, since that will set the render resolution to match the game's 720p assets. It's not such a great way to experience a 1080p display, though, and when we captured the game it was bordered on all four sides. There's no time like the present, right? To test out integer scaling we played through the game's tutorial. Thanks to its native 720p resolution FTL is also a great candidate for integer scaling on high-resolution displays, since it fits a 1440p monitor with 2x scaling, a 2160p 4K display scaled 3x, and a mammoth 5K display with a scale factor of 4x. This one has been in the Steam library completely unplayed for far too long and it's one of those games that I've always wanted to get around to. One of the best-reviewed retro style games on Steam and GOG is FTL: Faster Than Light, where you run a space ship and try to save the galaxy. We'll look at how a couple of popular indie-retro games, FTL: Faster than Light and Stardew Valley, look with integer scaling. Instead, many small development studios have elected to paint their pixels with retro colors and styling. Thanks to sky-high development costs, even when graphics engines like Unreal or Unity are completely free, that stem from having to make tons of art. We've experienced something of a Throwback Renaissance these past few years.
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