Playing an old video game on a modern device can truly change how you feel about it, and that"s partly because those old games were designed for much lower resolution screens and were never meant to run on the high-resolution displays we use nowadays, which are going up to 8K UHD.
Nvidia has set out to solve this problem, and it"s been thinking about a solution for at least two years. Now, if a new patent is any indication, it looks like the company might be close to its goal.
The "infinite resolution" technology proposed by the GPU giant is actually a relatively simple concept - and not entirely new: instead of bundling static texture packs for specific resolutions, developers would use scalable vector graphics and include a single set of texture information that automatically adapts to the screen resolution the game is running on. This would allow games to render as clearly in future, higher-resolution devices as they do on current ones.
This kind of adaptability is common in graphic design, but it"s never been used for gaming purposes, which is what the company is trying to change. The new rendering technology could have its drawbacks, for example, in performance, as generating the textures in real time could be more resource-intensive than loading preset texture files.
Even if Nvidia"s solution does come to fruition, textures are only one aspect of what makes older games look visibly worse than modern ones, and the polygon count wouldn"t be increased by this technology. Nonetheless, "infinite resolution" could be one major step forward in that regard.
Source: Nvidia (USPTO filing) via Digital Trends