So we started doing 10bit444 encodes primarily, and they show little to no loss in colors and audio, thanks to the modern technologies. But there are still cases, where their quality is not enough to produce a highly enjoyable view. This is once again about 3D!
With 2D games, one just upscales the SD encode using his player to fullscreen, point-based, and sees the same sharp and clear picture as it is before compression, or inside the emulator. And that's enough to make a feel of a quality encode. But for 3D, the anti-aliasing technique became an absolute sign of hi quality. Watching 3D games at 240p, even without color loss, feels handicapped. It is
kind of accurate to the original hardware and stuff, but the notion of a HQ 3D content isn't there anymore.
This issue doesn't exist in Dolphin, where the native resolution is already 480p, so all 3D stuff looks quite good. Even though anti-aliasing to HD will still look as an improvement, it's not "bad" without it anymore. It's just good vs. perfect.
Aktan (cheers!) has always been the one to boost encode quality as possible. So to overcome the issue of SD encodes looking "bad" he started adding HQ encodes to his publications, which were 2x the SD res, with some additional manual quality boosts, like increasing the bitrate. The latest 10bit444/Opus standard overcame that need (see paragraph 2)... except for 3D games!
So, what I'm suggesting, is doing those extra HQ encodes for all non-Dolpin 3D games. But doing it in 100% cases is going to seem too labour-consuming for publishers. So I'll be glad if this task it taken on the basis similar to camhack (or cutsceneless) encodes. Once the game is worth it, why not do an extra pair of great-looking encodes?
The way to do it looks like this: you dump at the highest resolution you can, then while encoding, downscale it to some 480p (LanczosResize for example), and then just encode as usual. The picture then doesn't look too blurry, and all the textures look really good.
Looks superb, huh? Yes, Crash may be an exceptional case due to all its tricks to look more colorful than all the rest 3D games of that era, but the tendency is pretty clear.
The only problem now is, what settings shall we encode with? Regular SD command line can run only at 0.2 fps for me!
How to speed it up?
How to make it still not grow in size?
And to still look lossless?
