I've got a 480x270 pixel art game that is using some shaders/effects applied to the layout (necessary for a distinct style that my game requires). I've been happily developing with 1080p desktops in mind, but recently bought a 4k monitor and was kind of horrified at how badly the game ran when scaling up using the "high" fullscreen quality. Now, that might come as no surprise, but as this size monitor is becoming more and more ubiquitous and in the interest of future proofing my game as best as possible I'd like to see what sort of solutions there might be.
My settings are:
480x270 viewport
letterbox integer scale
fullscreen quality: high
sampling: nearest
no pixel rounding
Shaders/effects used (not all at once necessarily, but these can be switched on and off by the user)
BetterCRT
Diskblur
RGBAChannelSeparation
The game runs great on the low quality setting, but the issue is that the shaders and text then look terrible when stretched out over a high res screen.
On high quality the shaders are the performance culprit as switching them off results in decent enough performance. We could just blame the shaders here, but I'm wondering if there's an intermediate solution that can balance quality and performance.
I know it's kind of weird, but for this particular project I need the best of both worlds - both crisp, perfect pixel art, but also some high quality effects such as blurs, CRT etc
Digging around the forums I came across this post, which seems to be discussing a similar sort of thing - but the file being discussed is no longer there - it does look like Ashley provided a solution at the end though, so that gives me some hope...
What would be great would be to upscale the game from 480x270 to 1080p using the high quality, and then upscale that again to 2k 4k etc using the low quality (if that makes sense). Is there a way to do this?
How are you guys that are publishing games to desktop commercially dealing with future proofing your games?