Image scaling: 3dfx vs Nvidia

[richleader]

I posted this in the highly technical forum but didn't get any takers:

I noticed this when I installed the game puzzlebobble/bustamove on my Lan, that the machines with 3dfx parts and nvidia parts produced much different images when the 320X240 display was scaled up to full screen. The 3dfx cards produced an image that was very crisp, appearing to be a bilinear scaling, with rough jagged lines. The Nvidia parts, on the other hand, from an ancient Riva 128 to a Geforce 2 Pro produced an image with smoother curves, albeit almost blurry, as if it were a bicubic transform (in photoshop terms, I do layout, not programming). I'm curious if these settings can be tweeked and if video overlay mode is operating the same way on the respective cards and if there is a performance cost, perhaps in the interest of faster (if less pretty) divx playback on some of the older machines equipped with Nvidia cards.

 

[PotNoodle]

It may be down to how it processes that resolution. For instance I was once told that 3dfx cards couln't actually achieve a resolution as low as 320x240, and in fact it was rendering at 640x480 but rendering 4 pixels for every one (if you see what I mean!).