Crisp pixel art look with image-rendering

This article discusses a useful technique for giving your canvas/WebGL games a crisp pixel art look, even on high definition monitors.

The concept

Retro pixel art aesthetics are getting popular, especially in indie games or game jam entries. But since today's screens render content at high resolutions, there is a problem with making sure the pixel art does not look blurry. Developers have been manually scaling up graphics so they are shown with blocks that represent pixels. Two downsides to this method are larger file sizes and compression artifacts.

original size	4x size	4x size (scaled with an image editor)
none	vendor's algorithm	nearest-neighbor algorithm

A CSS-based solution

The good news is that you can use CSS to automatically do the up-scaling, which not only solves the blur problem, but also allows you to use the images in their original, smaller size, thus saving download time. Also, some game techniques require algorithms that analyse images, which also benefit from working with smaller images.

The CSS property to achieve this scaling is image-rendering. It is still experimental, but there is partial support in most browsers. The steps to achieve this effect are:

• Create a <canvas> element and set its width and height attributes to the original, smaller resolution.
• Set its CSS width and height properties to be 2x or 4x the value of the HTML width and height. If the canvas was created with a 128 pixel width, for example, we would set the CSS width to 512px if we wanted a 4x scale.
• Set the <canvas> element's image-rendering CSS property to some value that does not make the image blurry. Either crisp-edges or pixelated will work. Check out the image-rendering article for more information on the differences between these values, and which prefixes to use depending on the browser.

An example

Let's have a look at an example. The original image we want to upscale looks like this:

Here's some HTML to create a simple canvas:

<canvas id="game" width="128" height="128"></canvas>

CSS to size the canvas and render a crisp image:

canvas {  
  width: 512px;
  height: 512px;
  image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;
  image-rendering: -webkit-crisp-edges;
  image-rendering: pixelated;
  image-rendering: crisp-edges;
}

And some JavaScript to set up the canvas and load the image:

// get canvas context
var ctx = document.getElementById('game').getContext('2d');
// load image
var image = new Image();
image.onload = function () {
    // draw the image into the canvas
    ctx.drawImage(image, 0, 0);
}
image.src = 'https://mdn.mozillademos.org/files/12640/cat.png';

This code used together produces the following result: