Written while this is still in the working tree. It is being tested, not served.

The lower picture settings work the way they do in most games: draw the scene at less than the size of your window, then scale the result up to fill it. You trade some sharpness for a lot of speed. Balanced draws at seven tenths, Performance at six.

They were softer than that trade should cost, and had been for as long as they have existed. The scene is built out of millions of little overlapping ovals, and the size each one should be on screen is worked out against the window. It was then being drawn into the smaller picture without anybody adjusting for the difference. At seven tenths every oval came out about half again too wide. At six, two thirds too wide, covering nearly three times the area it should.

The effect is a picture that has been quietly smeared before it is scaled up, so the scaling gets blamed for it. It also means dropping the setting bought less speed than it looked like it should, because the saving comes from covering fewer pixels and the ovals were busy covering more of them.

Measured against the same view drawn at full size, Balanced scored 24.6 where a perfect match is infinite and anything past about 40 is hard to tell apart by eye. With the sizes corrected it scores 49.6, at the same cost in frames. That is not a tuning change or a nicer filter. It is the setting finally drawing what it was always meant to draw.

What is uncomfortable about this one is how long it sat there. It does not look like a bug from the inside: nothing errors, nothing flickers, every setting does visibly get faster as you step down it. It only looks wrong next to a measurement, and the measurement did not exist until something else needed it.