Agreed. I can definitely see the problem with the original, but I'm not a fan of the new style. Like someone else said, it looks more like a cheap filter than a deliberately retro aesthetic. To be perfectly honest, I didn't see a problem with simply rendering to a higher resolution. But I may be in the minority on that one, heh.

But I think to get rid of the flickering, you have to start with a higher input resolution. When you're upscaling, you are always dealing with the same data, and just changing it around. So even though there's more pixels, when you move the camera slightly, you have chunks of pixels jumping around instead of individual pixels.I would try rendering at 1280x720, which gives more detail and finer wireframe, but downscale that back down to 630x360 with some kind of filter to smooth things out. It would be all up to the filter at that point, but I just think that's the only way to fix this. That or some kind of frame-persistence.

Ah, I follow your reasoning better now. > When you're upscaling, you are always dealing with the same data, and just changing it around. This especially seems an interesting point. Of course, we have currently only been looking at the dithered output, but a few pages back the whole "graphical pipeline" was laid out. Perhaps flicker prevention has to happen earlier? For example, an alternate idea would be to render the pre-dithered textures at low-res, upscale that, then pass some dithering algorithm to it. EDIT: Or alternatively, "staged" dithering, where the high-res input is first posterized (or something similar) to reduce detail, before being put through the 1-bit dithering process.

The new effect looks bad to me, too ... The pixel upscaling thing comes through badly and smells like old emulators, and the way the diagonal dither lines kind of swim reminds me of the 'shower door effect' -- the effect where a non-photorealistic rendering filter ends up just looking like you're looking at the scene through some dirty glass ... it just makes me wish I could turn it off. Also the old pixel aesthetic felt like it was reaching back to old computer graphics in a charming way, and this new look loses that and doesn't really get close enough to woodcut or anything else to actually make sense. So it loses the good nostalgia thing and replaces it with ... ambiguous confusion.