/vr/ - Retro Games

What is your opinion of bilinear filtering on emulators? To me, it is way too blurry. I prefer the nearest filter instead.

Why is it enabled by default in RetroArch?

Pic related.

>>2794636
>when you apply bilinear filtering to very low resolution textures, the result is too smooth to be recognizable. In such cases it can be a much better option to leave it unfiltered and use a smaller render target.
But that's false. It doesn't matter how big or small your texture is. It still looks better with texturing filtering than none. Why? Because as I wrote above with texture filtering you are displaying pixels calculated with more data.

>When you have low resolution and unfiltered textures, everything takes on the same blocky and pixelated look, and the simple polygonal structures work just fine to convey the convex landscapes found in Tomb Raider. The viewer fills in the blanks and the game looks good. However, when you apply bilinear filtering to its textures, and increase the resolution, you get a much "better" look at the polygonal structure. Suddently the blocky structure is far more obvious, and the smoothed textures tend to look like fabric wrapped over a wireframe, they're unable to convey any depth.

This sounds like nothing but unscientific anecdote. It might be better phrased as an argument that a noisy image tricks the player into seeing detail that doesn't exist.

>Bilinear filtering made N64 textures look worse

Nope. The textures really *are* that low res, the bilinear filtering isn't responsible.

No matter how low-res your textures are, bilinear filtering will always look better than point sampling on the same image. Pic related.