scale pixel art before import or inside the engine?

[daring spear]

I have a pixel art atlas that must be scaled 2x for the game that is 1280x720, the question is, which is better for performance?

• scale up the atlas before importing
• import at the original size the scale every sprite in the engine

I would rather make the game at 640x360, but the pixel font I've created doesn't show right at any size below 16.
The font was designed for half that size, but for some reason, I can't save a ttf font that's only 8 pixels tall.
And I couldn't figure out how to import the font as image into godot.
Any guides on using bitmap fonts in godot will be greatly appreciated.

[grim night]

The answer is to scale the font 2x and save. TTF files are supposed to have 1024, 2048, or 4096 pixels per em, anyway, so there's no harm at all if your font has a grid size of 128 pixels.

Don't bother importing the font as an image. Using a TTF font is way easier than using a BitmapFont, unless you want to add textures to all the letters, and you have the specialized tools to generate a texture font.

[daring spear]

I've tried doing that, now the font shows without any blur at size 8, but it's still twice the size I need.
Tried it the other way, by halving the size, the font got messed up.
But doing all this gave me the idea of just increasing the em size of my 1x file and it works, now the font shows perfect at 8px.
Thank you, you've helped me immensely.