Have you ever heard the phrase “You should never meet your hero?” If you're a fan of old-school games, playing those classic titles on a modern monitor could have a similarly negative effect. Your “hero” is likely to greet you with blurry, low-resolution graphics that have you questioning your fond memories. Worry not, time traveler: Nvidia has a solution for you!

Nvidia GeForce Integer Scaling

Nvidia integer scaling will take a low-resolution image, such as a classic game, and upscale it to better match your monitor. This means cleaner text, and an overall sharper image. With the new pixelized image, it's a breath of fresh air compared to other solutions that often make the image blurry and undefined.

Nvidia

If you have a 4K monitor and want to play a more demanding game with a weaker GPU, integer scaling can help there too. In this case, you can scale the game to 1080p, thus making it less demanding on a weaker graphics card. You'll still have a sharper and better-quality image with better performance, too. Even though you're not utilizing the entirety of your 4K monitor's resolution, the integer scaler will help bridge the gap.

How to turn on Integer Scaling

First, you'll want to make sure you have at least a GeForce GTX 16-series or later GPU, such as an RTX 20/30 series. This will not work on Pascal 10 Series GPUs, like a GTX 1080 Ti, for example.

Thiago Trevisan/IDG

After making sure you have up-to-date GeForce drivers, you'll want to right-click on the desktop and open up Nvidia Control Panel. (On Windows 11 you'll first click Show more options, and then the panel option will appear)

Head over to Display > Adjust desktop size and position. Here, you'll want to select the fourth option, Integer scaling. That's it, now this option is activated! Fire up your old-school games and give it a spin.

If you're on the hunt for a better gaming experience but don't want to shell out a ton of cash for a new GPU, one solution is to get a better monitor. Another alternative is a proper gaming laptop with souped-up internals. If that's the route you plan on taking, you'll want to check out this Acer Nitro 5 with an Nvida GeForce RTX 3060, which is currently on sale for $1,349 at Walmart. That's $450 off of the list price.

We reviewed this laptop in an upgraded configuration with the same Ryzen 7 processor, but with a GeForce RTX 3070 instead of a 3060 and with a QHD display instead of 1080p. We gave that version four out of five stars, calling it “outstanding value among midrange gaming laptops.”

With this laptop's RTX 3060 GPU, it should give you no-compromises 1080p gaming in most games. If you want to put this clamshell on a secondary monitor, you could even try 1440p, though that will require some compromises such as reducing the graphics quality.

This laptop is rocking a 17.3-inch 144Hz IPS display and a Ryzen 7 5800H processor, which is a Zen 3 CPU with eight cores and sixteen threads and a boost to 4.4GHz. For RAM and storage, you get 16GB of memory and a 1TB NVMe SSD. This laptop also comes with Windows 10 Home, but you can probably upgrade it to Windows 11.

[Today's deal: 1080p Acer Nitro 5 for $1,349 at Walmart.]