At present, AMD's and NVIDIA's graphics drivers use bilinear or bicubic interpolation to scale up a signal of less than the native resolution of the display device. This has detrimental effects on image quality, especially with regard to text, line and pixel art. The pixels become smoothed and the image soft.

Integer scaling, also known as nearest neighbour interpolation, multiplies each pixel by a whole number. In the case of full-HD to ultra-HD scaling, each signal pixel becomes 4 display pixels of the exact same colour value, preserving the original signal's integrity and clarity. Similarly, with other resolutions the signal is scaled to the largest possible integer, to provide the largest possible display image without any other alteration to the signal.

We, customers of AMD and NVIDIA's graphics hardware, are requesting integer scaling to be implemented as an option in the driver software.

As ultra-high definition (and better) displays are becoming the norm, the demand for this option will only increase. A great deal of games and applications will not function well at those native resolutions, and will suffer image degradation from the current smoothed image scaling.