I should note that what cranky is doing in his image editor ends up producing a better picture than GPU scaling. Their algorithms really are not that great compared to the decent image editors.
I don't think that's true, really. There's only so much "great" you can get out of an algorithm that turns a low resolution into a high resolution. Nvidia scaling doubles every other scanline and interpolates. How much more can you improve on that? Plus, I'm using MS Paint. I'll eat my hat if MS Paint produces a better picture than my GPU does.
say, playing Starcraft for example. you're either gonna play it in a small native rez box in the centre of the widescreen, or scale it up with the GPU
or are there other solutions that scale up the game better than the GPU does?
Hack solution aside (since trying it with Battle.Net is a bad idea), scaling it up with the GPU is the best solution.
in dosbox I can either set the fullscreen resolution to something really big, and not use nvidia scaling, OR I can leave it small or 800x600 (I think the driver's minimum) and turn on scaling to get it filling the picture?
what's the difference in practice? in image? performance? is one software scaling (done on the cpu) and the other gpu scaling?
If you set DOSBox to use your native resolution, then the software will scale the 320x200 game up to your native resolution. However, the software may very well accomplish this through GPU scaling routines anyway. So the end result would be the same, only the GPU scaling is controlled by DOSBox instead of your drivers.
Personally, I just let DOSBox use default behavior, in which it doubles the lines, making the games go from 320x200 to 640x400. That 640x400 is then scaled to my native res through GPU scaling.
Monitors with built in scaling circuitry usually do the best job.
No they don't. Most monitors do a
horrible job of scaling, and make the image look awful when it isn't native resolution. Even ones with decent scaling, such as mine, still aren't as good as GPU scalers. Consoles are the only reason to use monitor scaling.