monitors without native resolution support are now a thing

[Xer Xian]

Integer scaling does not maintain picture integrity under all circumstances - it certainly doesn't for 3d graphics, or real life footage, where there would be added jaggedness. That said, a 4k display may well do a better job at displaying 720p than a 1080p one, since there's more headroom for remapping the picture.

[ZellSF]

Integer scaling does not maintain picture integrity under all circumstances - it certainly doesn't for 3d graphics, or real life footage, where there would be added jaggedness.

An integer scale is a perfect reproduction of the input picture. It does not do anything negative to picture integrity. There is nothing added to the image. What you might perceive as more jaggedness might be the lack of flaws of older displays that would smooth the picture out.

Of course it's valid to point out that 360/PS3 games might not have been designed to play on perfectly sharp displays and using the extra resolution for some smoothing might be desirable.

[Xyga]

Integer scaling does not maintain picture integrity under all circumstances - it certainly doesn't for 3d graphics, or real life footage, where there would be added jaggedness.

It does absolutely, but its purpose is not to make any source look better upscaled or anything like that. I wasn't implying anything about it there anyway, Integer scaling has limited uses (it can be used in combination with smoother resizing with benefits too, but apparently it's more complicated than it sounds)

That said, a 4k display may well do a better job at displaying 720p than a 1080p one, since there's more headroom for remapping the picture.

Again theres the 'may', I won't stop nagging on the topic sorry but; more real estate doesn't necessarily make the scaling better, how the fractional scaling is implemented still matters enormously, even if there's not much 'work' to do it's easy to mess up.
But because over 4K the imperfections are harder to see to the naked eye people assume - also knowing about the multiples - that the resulting scaling is always better, and I don't agree with that. In fact I think our eyes are capable of telling the differences even in this situation but for most only in the occurence of direct comparisons.
If for instance Rting's usual scaling test wasn't this worthless I think more people would get it, in the realm of monitors it's even more obvious (and worse) but reviews don't do enough to show it. Yet if you look closely there's a great variety of PQ differences between displays even at 1080>4K, and constants within brands which often surprisingly remind of what they did in the past with FHD displays, Sony still rule overall, in cases Samsung often oversharpen, and LG can lack details and integrity.

[BazookaBen]

I should also mention that many games of the PS3/360 era didn't even run internally at 720p. It was usually even lower, like 600p or 540p. But my point about PS3 is that it still only supported 720p output on most games, whether they were running internally at 720p or something lower (vanquish for example runs at 1024x720).

So at least with a 4k TV, you have many more pixels to smooth out that 720p than you do on a 1080p TV.

But the TRUE solution is to build a gaming PC, because it has >90% of the PS3/360/PS4/XBO library, and you'll be able to play most of the old games at 4k. And on newer games you can run at a sub-resolution like 1440p or 1600p with only one scaling pass.

[Konsolkongen]

Almost no 360 and PS3 games run at 1080p. These are 720p systems.

720p also has the potential to upscale better on a 4k display than a 1080p one, because 720p devides evenly with 2160p. So I would argue that a 4k screen is the best choice for console gamers. Unless of course the built in scaler absolutely rapes the lower resolutions with “smoothing” when upscaling

Am I missing something? 1080 also divides evenly with 4k (line-doubles to 2160p), and these consoles will output a 1080p signal. Are you saying that the PS3 and Xbox 360 render at 720p and scale to 1080p, so configuring these consoles to output 720p and letting the display line-triple will result in a better picture than configuring them for 1080p and letting the display line-double?

In my experience, with the TVs I’ve owned, this is the truth yes.

The 360 also adds horrible screen tearing in some Capcom games when upscaling to 1080p. This was certainly true for Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Not sure if they eventually fixed this, always thought this console was a piece of s***, and after I had five units failing I primarily played on the PS3

[Xer Xian]

An integer scale is a perfect reproduction of the input picture. It does not do anything negative to picture integrity. There is nothing added to the image.

Integer scaling does not maintain picture integrity under all circumstances - it certainly doesn't for 3d graphics, or real life footage, where there would be added jaggedness.

It does absolutely

Ok, let me rephrase that as 'integer scaling does not give the best result under all circumstances'. It certainly adds nothing to the picture, but that's the point - sometimes it'd be better to smooth out hard edges, especially when the original resolution is low. Or when the content is displayed on significantly larger screen, as it would be in my case where I'd go from a pretty small monitor to whatever is the lowest diagonal available for a 4k TV (I think OLEDs don't come under 50" or so?).

I've posted a picture comparison of the OSSC Line2x480 vs. non-integer uspcale sometime ago on the OSSC thread showing the difference, but I can't find the pictures anymore. In any case, the difference is not something to write home about, and some help in the form of an anti-aliasing filter/smoother is still generally needed to improve the result whatever the upscaling method. I guess last-gen games would hold up better, and displaying them on a 4k TV might be perfectly fine even with a larger screen size after all.