schellingb
Proposal of switching Aspect Ratio Correction to On by default
I think that the final user would be happier to have core's aspect ratio like the one seen in CRT monitors by default.
Last year we had a large discussion in #512 on the topic where the default setting for the Aspect Ratio Correction came up again. You can find my comment regarding the default mode in this post.
So I mentioned there being open to switching the default but not being excited about this part:
I think text in the default SVGA console looks really bad with aspect ratio correction. The core generally always starts in that SVGA console mode with the start menu and having the text crunched horizontally just doesn't look appealing to me. What if... we had a aspect ratio mode "auto" that only applied it in non-text modes?
Do you think such an auto mode would be a bad solution? Where we keep the console uncorrected and games with graphics would have their aspect ratio corrected. Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Aspect ratio correction ON on the left and OFF on the right:
If you ask me, I would not like the "auto aspect" solution.
To be honest I mostly cared about giving the frontend (i.e. RetroArch) the raw pixelbuffer and let it handle any conversion with > shaders and aspect ratio correction as desired by the user.
I totally agree with that, shaders are best left with the raw framebuffer (indeed I'm asking for it/raw with the "hint" for the proper 4:3 by default).
What I see from the image you posted on the left screenshot, is a low resolution screen with NN filtering scaling, but enabling bilinear fixes things up:
Or, If one prefer sharp pixels on a 1920x1080 screen, things are not that bad either:
Not to mention Integer scaling options, in Retroarch 1.20 there are a lot of options the user can set when he wants sharp pixels., so users that do not want to use shaders, have already options to display a sharp image with the aspect ad scaling they want, even if the core is set to 4:3
..but since RetroArch 1.20, shaders have finally a way to access the Aspect Ratio set by the core, and shaders are mostly immune to pixel decimation issues, so my point is that defaulting to 4:3 could possibly help shaders without affecting the ability for non shader users to have sharp and pixel perfect images.
I understand your point tho, it is a matter of targeting which kind of user.