How to Use OBS Point Scale Filtering for Sharp Pixels

When streaming or recording retro games in OBS Studio, default scaling settings can make low-resolution emulation look blurry and washed out. This article provides a direct, step-by-step guide on how to change your OBS “Scale Filtering” setting to “Point”—also known as nearest-neighbor interpolation. Applying this setting ensures your retro game sources scale up cleanly, maintaining the sharp, pixel-perfect aesthetic of classic hardware.

Why Use Point Scale Filtering?

By default, OBS Studio uses bilinear or bicubic scaling to smooth out edges when resizing sources. While this works well for high-resolution modern games and webcams, it ruins retro art by blurring the defined edges of individual pixels.

Selecting Point filtering tells OBS to scale the source using nearest-neighbor interpolation. This duplicates the pixels mathematically without blending them, resulting in crisp, hard edges that look identical to how retro games appear on actual CRT displays or pixel-accurate modern scalers.

Step-by-Step: How to Enable Point Filtering in OBS

To apply Point filtering to your emulation source, follow these steps:

Open OBS Studio and navigate to the scene containing your emulator or retro game capture.
Go to the Sources dock and find your game capture source (such as Window Capture, Game Capture, or Video Capture Device).
Right-click on the source in the Sources list, or right-click the source directly in the preview window.
In the context menu that appears, hover your cursor over Scale Filtering.
Click on Point from the sub-menu.

Once selected, you will instantly see the preview window update. The blurry edges of your retro game will sharpen into clean, distinct pixels.

Additional Tips for the Best Retro Quality

To get the absolute best results when using Point filtering, keep these two factors in mind:

Aspect Ratio: Keep your emulator’s aspect ratio locked (typically 4:3 for retro consoles) when stretching the source in OBS. To scale your source while preserving its aspect ratio, hold the Shift key while dragging the boundary corners in the OBS preview window, or simply right-click the source, go to Transform, and select Fit to screen.
Integer Scaling: Point filtering looks best when scaling by whole numbers (e.g., 2x, 3x, 4x). If you notice uneven pixel sizes (shimmering), check if your emulator has an “Integer Scaling” option enabled before capturing it in OBS.