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I'll have to give this a try. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing, but Doom feels "wrong" at higher resolutions and hardware-accelerated texture smoothing. In the past I usually set GZDoom to a 720p resolution with software rendering while disabling up/down mouselook. This to me is the best of maintaining a "classic" Doom feel while still supporting widescreen.

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My pet theory is: Doom's aesthetic is dark and scary. Being low-res helps with that, as does artifacting on distant surfaces (aliasing), and the way the 8-bit COLORMAP [1] turns things gray and splotchy. The darkness is exaggerated, compared to a high-res image with trilinear texture filtering and 24-bit color.

[1] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP

Simply disabling texture filtering would go a long way toward keeping the game looking the way the developers intended, without disabling hardware acceleration, widescreen, or other quality of life improvements.

Same with retro emulators. Smooth, blended pixels just feel wrong.

Funny, I grew up playing the original DOOM and Quake, and when the Nintendo 64 came out with texture filtering I wanted to get that look into those games more than anything in the world (at least in Quake it did eventually get official support via GLQuake). My last playthroughs were at my screen's native rez with texture filtering, a remixed music pack, remastered audio, and with Brutal Doom installed, and the experience was like everything I dreamed Doom was back in the day. A retro-accurate version of the game just feels bland.

(On another note, Quake II RTX revitalizes an already great game, definitely check it out if you can run it)

I find it really hard to play Doom, Quake and Quake II with any sort of filtering or texture packs.

There's always something that ruins the immersion for me. Round pixels, for example? Can't do it.

Texture packs I can agree with. Maybe I just like the filtered textures look.

Ironically I like to play emulated 8/16bit games upscaled with no smoothing, when CRTs of the day actually did some smoothing

You can turn texture filtering off in the modern Doom 64 port and its night and day

But Doom 64 on the 64 had filtered textures! It's the one place where that was default!

Oh I know that's how it originally was. I think the N64 required it but I'm not sure. Either way I didn't play it at the time so I don't have any nostalgia for the look. But IMO it looks leagues better without.

I feel like you're my exact opposite. Quake 2 is a boring game and the RTX version is like spraying a fine mist of water all over Quake 2 and shining at it with a flashlight. Doom is best enjoyed largely untouched mechanically because its design is still unique and unrivaled. Brutal Doom completely throws everything off and turns it into an obnoxious gorefest.

We should meet and fight in a schoolyard some time.

I think the first Quake it's more fun than Quake 2. And a total conversion called Malice totally owns Quake2.

Q2 is pretty boring compared to modern shooters, but it is one of the last games from it's particular vintage style of corridor-shooter FPS, and it does it better than it's priors mechanically. Full 3D, autorun, mouselook, none of this click-to-aim, walk-by-default crap

Soon thereafter Call of Duty hit the scene and everything goes downhill from there (save Half-Life)

edit- I remember seeing the fake screenshots on the back of the box of D-ZONE and getting pissed my game didn't look like that. It only took 20 years or so!

Thing is, CRT displays do a kind of smoothing on pixels

https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587

Very noticeable with NeoGeo games. A simple scanline filter (25%) is like night and day with Metal Slug.

That's a wonderful Twitter account. Instant follow.

also there are shaders in many emulators that apply this effect on modern monitors. but this is usually only for old console games, never seen one for pc games (but this crispy doom - or other doom modernizartion - could maybe incorporate them?)

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/74hzx3/what_is_t...

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT-Royale

But old games were not pixelated. The low resolution tied with the blurry, leaky old CRTs made sure of that.

The problem is our monitors, nowadays, are too good so we see pixels that we never saw back then.

That is true. I don't mind the pixel-perfect upgrade, but I wonder if any texture filter can do justice to vector games like Asteroids, where the bullets really lighted up the screen, it felt like they were dangerous and explosive.

I guess it all boils down to personal preferences. I grew up with consoles that used huge pixels, so in my mind they were perfect squares.

I don’t think that the developers “intended” the game to look the way it does, they were merely responding to the constraints of the platform available at the time. Sure, we all can appreciate the “classic” look and feel, but to imply that it is to any degree essential to enjoying the game would be a bit disingenuous. I have no doubt that kids today would enjoy this game a lot more if, for example, the sprites were in higher resolution and used a smoother animation.

> I don’t think that the developers “intended” the game to look the way it does, they were merely responding to the constraints of the platform available at the time.

It's a distinction without a difference, as the end result is graphical assets (textures, sprites, etc.) that were designed to be displayed without any filtering.

I recently played through Doom and Doom II via GZDoom and had a great experience playing at 1080p and with disabled texture filtering. I didn't play these games when they first came out so mouselook feels natural to me and I'd recommend it for people in similar positions. These games really do hold up

I agree with the resolution and texture smoothing, but I really like the mouselook, though. On the higher difficulty levels, with autoaim disabled, the experience is really intense. Of course I like the Brutal Doom mod as well.

However, the software rendering in GZDoom does that 256-color-only fade out thing which really contributed to the scary, gritty look of the original. Game looks "better" with that enabled even if it's not truly 3-d rendered.

That's the awesome thing about GZDoom though. Everyone can make it their own game and customize it how they want. It's fascinating people are still making new levels for it.

I played a doom port recently that had up/down mouselook and aiming. Very wrong.

Part of the issue is old games were designed for the shitty 13-15" CRTs of the day. They had a natural amount of antialiasing from phosphor bleed and dot pitch of the shadow mask. Game art often took advantage of these limitations.

You see the same issues with old console games on emulators. While some people like the "pixelated" look you see with default settings, it's not how the games actually looked on a CRT.

I play , with Zandronum, with nearest mipmapping. It simply feels better with these low resolution textures on a high resolution screen.

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