OpenGL Super Resolution issues - opengl

Question

I have a OpenGL based gui. I use super resolution to be able to handle various scales. Instead of scaling images up, they are downscaled(unless it so happens someone is running at 4000x4000+ resolution).
The problem is, OpenGL doesn't seem to downscale smoothly. I have artifacts as if the scaling is nearest neighbor. (e.g. the text edges are blocky, even though they are not in the original)
These are the settings I use:
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexEnvf(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_REPLACE);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP);
Here is a sample of the artifacts, the scaling is 2:1 I believe. Maybe it isn't exact though due to window edges and such.
You can see the left edge looks perfect(it's not though) but the right edge has weird breaks in it. The original graphic is perfectly symmetrical and no artifacts.
I've tried GL_NEAREST, GL_LINEAR. No mipmapping so...
Surely OpenGL is not that poor at scaling? I'd like something like bi-cubic scaling or something that will produce good results.
I am using OpenGL 1.1. I could potentially pre-scale images but I'd have to do that every time the window sizes changes and might be slow in cpu.
I have jagged edges on some images too. The whole point of super resolution was to avoid all this ;/
Is there some settings I'm missing?

Answer 1

First you have to understand signal theory, namely the Nyquist Theorem (that wikipedia page is overly specific when talking signals in the "time" domain; the principles are universal for all kinds of discretely sampled signals, including images). When downsampling you always must apply a lowpass anti aliasing filter that cuts off all frequency components above half the sampling frequency to avoid the creation of aliasing artifacts. Without filtering even a linear integrating downsampler will create artifacts. The realtime graphics way of implementing a low pass filter for textures are mipmaps. Every mipmap level cuts off at exactly half the frequency of the next higher level.
You have two options now:
Implement mipmapping
Implement a downsampling fragment shader
Of course the sane thing to do would be not to render in an excess resolution in the first place, but render your GUIs at exactly the target resolution.

Answer 2

With the code you provided, i will make guess at what might be the problem.
Try to load your image or at least allocate the memory before you set those texture parameters with glParameteri. And also, set GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER to GL_LINEAR
Perhaps you meant super sampling (SSAA) which use 2 or more times the original resolution and downsample it to get a smooth image?

Answer 3

It does look from your image that it is using Linear filtering (bilinear)
Try using Anisotropic filtering:
glGetFloatv(GL_MAX_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT, &aniso);
glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT, aniso);
Anisotropic filtering can be applied at different levels, this code will apply it at the maximum level, you can use a number less than aniso if you like. These are extention macros, if you don't have the extention defenitions, they are this:
#define GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT 0x84FE
#define GL_MAX_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT 0x84FF