What?
You can set the game to a lower resolution than your monitor, but have the GPU upscale the game to fit. It's called...
GPU Scaling
See what I did there?
Moving along.
Why?
If you have a 1024x768 or 720p monitor playing X3, you won't care. For the 99.23% of gamers that use a higher resolution, it's all we've got to preserve older games.
In X3, when you open the map, it fills the screen at 1024x768, and fills most of it at 720p. Higher resolutions not only make the map smaller, but also the text. There are text mods you can install right now to increase the size of text, seriously, it's easier than figuring out how much to tip the pizza man. But there's no way to increase the size of UI elements such as the map.
That's right! And for those not paying attention. This will up scale the UI and text!
GPU Scaling. No not new news. Try saying that 3 times fast, but it's new to me and probably to you as well, you brave soul, go ahead and admit it. Otherwise why are you even here?
How?
Gotta admit, that's a weird sentence. I've never typed just the word "How?" in a sentence before, sure I've said it aloud and every time it reminded me of playing cowboys & indians. Don't judge. I'm 1/16th Native American. I can say that that.
I'm too lazy to test an AMD GPU, I read that it works and that's enough for me. Below is how it's done on nVidia cards in the nVidia Control Panel. Sure that'll change tomorrow as just a few months ago, it was accessed somewhere else. Oh nVidia.
https://i.imgur.com/OpDrGxr.png
All of those settings above, it'll be blurry. Not the good blurry either. It's just blurry without being drunk. Sounds boring. Like, where's the fun in that? So get drunk and go fly some spaceships! If someone complains that you lost notoriety by bumping their stupid gate on the way out. Then you know you're moving.
Integer Scaling, the only option that isn't blurry. It's for all of you fools that got a 4K monitor, set it to 2x, and set the game to 1080p or lower. For the rest of us plebs that can only dream. We get drunk X. DrunkX. That's pretty catchy.
Aspect Ratio, whenever you set a game to a resolution lower than your monitor's native resolution, it'll be stretched to fit your monitor's resolution, but it'll add black bars. Just like watching a movie you purchased that doesn't fit the aspect ratio of every TV. Oh the brilliance of drunk Hollywood. Well, at least I don't have to air my dirty laundry on twitter every 6 minutes just to remain relevant and employed. So drink up Hollywood!
Fullscreen option, my option of choice. Not only does it makes it blurry, but it'll stretch that screen. Boy, I wonder what Yisha would look like with some junk in that trunk, but it'd also put on a fat face on everyone else. Worth!
The resolution at the bottom is just a "preview" to show what it would look like. If you just use that thing, you can ignore everything I said above. Hmm. Maybe I should've mentioned that before.. DrunkX. Nah!
Also, make sure to apply the same settings on all of your monitors, in the pic above, I've no clue which monitor is which cause nVidia never imagined anyone would use this setting. Hah! Proved them wrong I did.
In X3, this also lets you enable AA, as it seems the nVidia Control Panel doesn't enhance AA in non-fullscreen X3 as much as I'd like.
Any better way to solve the blurryness? blurriness? Yea that? It's only text that's an issue it seems. You can either scale the UI or Text, but not both. Good work nVidia!