Intel releases beta driver with Retro Scaling for Ice Lake GPUs

Intel has released a GPU driver that adds the Retro Scaling feature. That’s the name Intel gives to integer scaling, which is supposed to improve the rendering of games with pixel art or low resolution.

The Retro Scaling function is currently only available in beta driver 25.20.100.7155 and only works for the GPUs of Ice Lake processors. In practice this means that few people can use it, there are hardly any products with Ice Lake processors on the market. The latest variant of the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 is currently the only laptop on sale that has an Ice Lake processor.

To use integer scaling, Retro Scaling must be enabled in the Intel Graphics Command Center. There is a choice of Scaled Width or Fixed Width. With the latter option, pixels are scaled up without further interpolation. An old game with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels can therefore be displayed at 2048×1536 pixels on a monitor with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels. Each pixel will then be shown four times, but there will also be black bars present.

Scaled Width uses the full screen height, resulting in an image of 2880×2160 pixels on that same 4k monitor. However, nearest neighbor interpolation is used, in which missing pixels are filled in on the basis of the four surrounding pixels.

Intel already promised in July that support for integer scaling will come to the GPU driver and then also gave explanations and examples of the functionality. It is not yet known when the function will be available for the integrated GPUs of other Intel processors. Nvidia released a driver for its RTX and GTX 16xx video cards at the end of August that includes support for integer scaling.