Here is a quick guide with some tips for making old games look better!

This is for older Windows games from places such as Steam, GOG or Origin.

I did make a nice little video. The video uses footage to demonstrate all these tweaks, well worth checking out!

Video link: https://youtu.be/P2vnKDeVO8g

But here is a brief outline of what the steps are:

Aspect ratio

Old games typically look best in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio. There is a setting in the graphics driver that lets the GPU scale the image while preserving the aspect ratio. Careful with resolutions: 1280 x 1024 is 5:4 and can sometimes result in vertically stretched images.

Resolution

With Nvidia cards you can create a custom resolution of 1600 x 1200. This will give you a very crisp, sharp and detailed image. I'm not sure if AMD supports this, but likely it does! Would be awesome for someone to test this.

AF

Texture filtering. Many games let you enable anisitropic filtering of 16x in the game. If not, just enable it in the driver. This will ensure that textures, such as tiles on the floor, look sharp and detailed as you look into the distance.

AA

And finally we can use antialiasing and get a more photo-realistic look. While many games have this as an option, you can further enhance, or override through the driver. You can also apply AA to transparent textures and for games that don't support AA, like Splinter Cell, a shader based AA technology can be used.

The result

Good looking retro games!

http://i.imgur.com/MMZK5nB.png

http://i.imgur.com/nqHiV62.png

http://i.imgur.com/UXX473u.png

http://i.imgur.com/ElaRVCK.png

Good info, especially for those old early-2000s games. When you start going back before graphics cards were a thing (mid-90s), most of these tips probably won't help. But that's okay, some of us are just fine with the retro look. :-)

While it is possible to use any high (4:3) resolution with many old games, in my experience it quite often makes all the in-game text, icons etc. far too small (unless you use a gigantic monitor, I guess).

I've had this problem at least with e.g. System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Unreal Gold, Wheel of Time, and quite a few other older 3D games. In the end, I've decided to play those games in 1024x768, 800x600 or sometimes even 640x480. I prefer being able to read the ingame text comfortably (even on my laptops) far more than the small visual improvement that running them in ultra-high resolutions might bring.

Quite often the higher resolutions don't even improve the image that much with older games, as their textures are so low res anyway and the 3D models quite crude. A crude box looks like a crude box, no mater which resolution you use. High resolutions matter more for modern games which have much more fine details on the scenery and models.

Fair point regarding UI elements. I use a 27" monitor, so the issue is not that major. Disagree on 1024 x 768 vs 1600 x 1200 though. IMO there is a very noticeable difference in quality. 1024 x 768 when scaled looks quite soft / blurry.

Frequent blinking, squinting and twinkling might also help.