Poor image quality after bad reboot

[ZonePhoenix]

A couple years ago (a long time i know) i was gaming and then started getting fps drops, so i hit the reset button and a flash went off in my case followed by a smell, and when it got into windows everything had become slightly blurry

After this i reformatted and tried some other stuff, then ended up building a new pc and even that was blurry which made no sense to me

Luckily i have a couple old screenshots from my old rig of how things used to output and i made this comparison photo of some taskbar icons but it affects everything including games

https://i.imgur.com/4HLMqSf.png
https://i.imgur.com/lN4o5xA.png

The quality now is just really bad, it looks like the color and intensity of each pixel is now alot dimmer than before and even the taskbar background color is pixelated, kind of like the whole computer putting out the screen image as a compressed .jpg instead of a .bmp is the best way i can explain it

Ingame:

https://i.imgur.com/B0mNNzw.png
https://i.imgur.com/Vx4DaFV.png
https://i.imgur.com/Mp6BpXO.png
https://i.imgur.cm/pYDGHdU.png

Has anyone ever experienced this and/or might know how to fix it?

[ToastyX]

Since those are screenshots, this has to be a software issue, not hardware. I don't really see anything wrong with either one. They look like different forms of scaling. The old one looks like nearest neighbor scaling, and the new one looks like interpolated scaling. To be honest, the new one looks better to me, and the old one looks distorted. The only question is why is there a difference and why did it suddenly change, and I'm not sure because Windows doesn't have a way to directly control which algorithm to use. I do know Windows has two methods of scaling. The old method only scaled fonts and might have done the sharper but distorted nearest neighbor scaling on icons. The new method lets DPI-aware programs scale themselves and does interpolated scaling for non-DPI-aware programs. I'm guessing you somehow had the old method enabled and a Windows update might have forced the new method at some point. If you still want to use the old method, this program might help: http://windows10-dpi-fix.xpexplorer.com/

[ZonePhoenix]

(03-17-2019 11:26 PM)ToastyX Wrote:  Since those are screenshots, this has to be a software issue, not hardware. I don't really see anything wrong with either one. They look like different forms of scaling. The old one looks like nearest neighbor scaling, and the new one looks like interpolated scaling. To be honest, the new one looks better to me, and the old one looks distorted. The only question is why is there a difference and why did it suddenly change, and I'm not sure because Windows doesn't have a way to directly control which algorithm to use. I do know Windows has two methods of scaling. The old method only scaled fonts and might have done the sharper but distorted nearest neighbor scaling on icons. The new method lets DPI-aware programs scale themselves and does interpolated scaling for non-DPI-aware programs. I'm guessing you somehow had the old method enabled and a Windows update might have forced the new method at some point. If you still want to use the old method, this program might help: http://windows10-dpi-fix.xpexplorer.com/

That's not true though, because if that was the case then all id have to do is set 100% dpi in windows and it would be fixed right? But it doesn't fix it because ingame everything is still blurry

The other thing is it literally doesn't matter what windows dpi you use, all that does is scales the desktop elements up and down, it doesn't change anything for the pixel output quality on the backend at all

For example you can put the dpi at 200% or 100%, windows 8.1 scaling or 10 scaling, it's literally all the same when you look at videos, play games, etc. It simply adjusts the desktop elements

[ZonePhoenix]

The other thing is when the flash in the case occurred from the psu it blew the cable on one of the monitors and it started showing green pixels until i replaced the cable

Not sure how its related

[ZonePhoenix]

Alot of people have said its windows so ive downloaded an iso of Windows 10 1511 from early 2016 to actually find that part out