How are PC games rendered?

[itsmydamnation]

now when to we bring aspect ratios into this

 

[Davros]

thanks for your help. so basically i have been misinformed all along and shouldnt listen to people who think games have to be programmed to 4k resolutions

Regarding PC games you have, console games however are programmed to run at a specific resolution (to keep the framerate up) connecting a console to a 4k display wont make a console game run in 4k
there is a list of console games and the resolution they run at here :
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241

current PC graphics cards support a max resolution of 8192 x 8192 (67.1 megapixel resolution)
although in practical terms they are limited to 7680x3200 because of max monitor resolution

 

[Grall]

i thought "super eagle" was like a filter that took the edge of the blocky pixels on sprite based games.

Albuquerque already made a good reply, I just wanted to add that Supereagle is an algorithm that can upscale anything. It doesn't absolutely have to be sprite based games - and the Supereagle algorithm doesn't even know anything about sprites - there's no way to tell what's a sprite or not in a finished bitmap image.

The reason Supereagle is popular in emulators (or at least was, when I last faffed with emulators years and years ago) is that it gives quite good results when smoothing out blocky graphics, for a not horrible performance cost. There are much more advanced upscaling methods that can smooth bitmaps on a fractional basis (supereagle always takes input pixels and produces a result image that's typically 3 or 4 times larger than the input), but these are much much slower, and performance was always an issue in the past.

Many PCs in the past could only barely run Super Nintendo games at full speed, so too much performance eaten by scaling meant the game started dropping frames, which was obviously not good.

 

[Reznor007]

Also, emulators for 3d systems like N64 or Playstation take the basic commands those games send to their graphics chips, and basically translate those into generic PC commands so they can be rendered at any resolution you want just like a PC game. This isn't as accurate in most of the emulators, and can cause graphics glitches in some games, but it works good enough for most.

 

[milk]

I can imagine by the time we have working ps360 emulator, running their games on different resolutions won't be as trivial with all the deffered renderers and post prossessing...

 

[Davros]

apparently there is a 360 emulator
use google as I'm not sure about the legallity