This is a question about the original Infinity Engine games -- not the Enhanced Editions -- and the main purpose is really just to share my own experience and satisfy my curiosity, with maybe the tiniest spark of hope that someone can provide an alternative that allows the games' original resolutions to be scaled up without the graphics becoming blurry.

I have been playing these and the other IE games for many years and as PC's and monitors evolved, CRT's were replaced by flat screens, native resolutions got higher and higher, and so on, we have basically always had these two ways to deal with the games' original resolutions:

1. We use the excellent widescreen mod to change the games' resolution to our flat panel's native resolution, resulting in a nice, crisp image but much smaller GUI, text, characters, and effectively a much more "zoomed out" look at the world.

or

2. We use the games' original resolution (640x480 or 800x600) and let our GPU scale it up to fit our panel's native resolution. Which gives us the game in its original format in terms of GUI and character scale, etc. -- the way it was designed -- but will result in a much blurrier image due to the scaling that has to be applied and, well, it just doesn't look as good.

I am curious which of these options you guys and girls use to deal with the resolution issue?

I have found that (for me) the widescreen mod was the way to go up to a certain point, but now that I have a panel with a native resolution of 1920x1080 things just become too damn small! I can change the font size through mods, sure, but the rest of the game, and especially the characters and the world, become way too small for my taste.

So I have recently tried using the games' standard resolutions with GPU scaling instead of the mod and, in a way, I really like it. It feels much closer to the original experience, I don't have to squint at the characters or at minor details in the game world, I can stick to the original fonts, I don't have to bother with additional GUI mods to pretty things up, the fog of war isn't covering 3/4 of the screen... but the bluriness of the image really nags at me. It's not *horrible*, but it's just enough for me to wonder if there isn't a better solution :|

I have tried a bunch of utilities that force borderless windowed modes, and CAN scale without blurring, but none can do so without (mostly cursor-related) game-breaking issues. I have found solutions in this vein for *other* games -- the widescreen patches for Fallout 1 and 2 provide a 2x scaling option that scales the entire game to 200% of its original resolution, resulting in a beautiful, crisp image, and there is a Glide Wrapper for Diablo II that scales without blurring -- has anyone found any way of achieving this with the IE games? I have requested a 2x scaling feature on the Widescreen Mod's forums but I'm not sure how much development is still being done on it these days.

This is an OpenGL and 3D issue -- the game was made for DirectX. If you are getting blurriness with one (supported) resolution, try another. For example, I get blurriness -- most noticeable in text fonts -- when I run the game with 3D at 800x600, but much less so if I change to 1024x768 with 3D enabled. On the other hand, if you disable 3D you get no blurriness, but miss out on some graphic effects, like better quality spell effects, or smoke effects. A fair trade-off. Note that this only applies to BG2, since there is only one resolution available natively for BG1.

Thanks for your reply, but in my experience the blurriness is caused by the GPU scaling done through NVIDIA's drivers -- ie. stretching the game to match my monitor's native resolution (while maintaining the 4:3 aspect ratio). Results might be different for ATI cards, but the game's 3D setting doesn't seem to have any effect on the quality of the image when scaled in this way.

Either way, I have found a way to achieve what I wanted. DXWnd let's me run the original BG in a borderless windowed mode on a black background (by enabling an option to hide my desktop) in a resolution of my choice. So, by running it in 1280x960 I achieve perfect 2x scaling and a beautiful, crisp image.

It is also often a problem with the monitor. I can set my screen for a resolution of 1024x768 for example, on my 16:9 monitor as a 4:3 or I can stretch it. But this setting have to come from the monitor himself.

Hi, I know your post is ages old, but I'm curious if you have any insight on how to set up DXWnd in the way you mention you've done here. I've been unable to replicate this.