I'm going to guess if you did it on the video card and simply disabled those enhancements it would be considerably more energy efficient than doing it on the CPU as well which (a) means your laptop battery lasts longer on a charge, and (b) also opens up the possibility of not needing a particularly powerful CPU in order to juice the resolution, because the video hardware is doing the work for you.

From a programming perspective I do completely get the desire to have the CPU do all the work though - if you want absolutely everything under your control it's easier, and especially if your game is single-threaded.

It's just like how pixelated 2D graphics is called "8-bit" now.

Concur. Feels like a conflation; CPU vs GPU rendering doesn't change the appearance directly. The article performs further conflations later re the OS comparison and Steam re Ion Fury etc.

Valve added this as an option to Half-Life in the 25th anniversary update, and I thank them for it - it looks much cooler.

I like when games use nearest, or dedicated pixel art shaders. Bilinear just looks low-effort to me, especially when it's used for whole-screen scaling! Apple's Lanczos also looks a bit disgusting to me, I can't tolerate the display scaling on iPad because of this.

If you want to have the true PSX gaming experience you can also round all vertex coordinates to the next pixel and force noperspective interpolation.

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