Yup, I did, but my own analysis of the original pics tells me the reduced detail is from a reduced mipmap.
Yeah, that might be so, but thats in addition to the unnessesary vertical blur.
I also see a much bigger difference between your third and fourth images than you do.
I don't know what you see in those pictures, but yeah, there is a big difference between image 3 and 4. Image 4 has
even more blur!
If there is any vertical blurring, it is extremely subtle (much less than you did in the third pic) and not enough to explain the reduced texture quality.
Much less!? There is much more blur! Let me demonstrate, I have taken the image from #168, but isolated out one column from every picture, just to only focus on the vertical blur.
Column 1: From unscaled picture, no vertical blur.
Column 2: From horizontaly scaled picture, no vertical blur.
Column 3: From horizontaly scaled picture with a small vertical blur filter added, some vertical blur.
Column 4: From original scaled picture, huge amount of vertical blur.
And this is on polygon edges, where no blurring should be if it were only texture blurring.
Reduced mipmap level also explains why the 720p pic has muddy highlights.
The 720 picture also had this unnessesary vertical blur applied
Doing the same point sampling downscale from 1080p gives 720p more artificial texture detail also, so I think the comparison between the old 960x1080 and 1280x720 pics was still fair.
Yeah, that I totally agree on, I never said the 960x1080 vs. 1280x720 comparison wasnt fair, only that something was wrong with the upscaling of the pictures. And as I've already said, I noticed this first on the 960x1080 picture, since it shouldnt have any vertical blur at all.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. We have new source images from macabre. I've attached another comparison in this post. It's not a tremendous difference, but you see vertical edge aliasing standing out and textures being blurrier, and the better horizontal edges are little consolation.
The lesson for the day is more pixels aren't always better.
Yup, agreed.
Edit: I've said it already, but I just want to clarify. The reason I critizised those orignial scaled images was not because they gave an unfair advantage to the 1280x720 picture over the 960x1080, because they didn't. My whole point the entire time has only been that those images made the scaled pictures look worse than they should, making it look like the leap to full 1080p resolution is larger than it really is.