I've been thinking lately about how much I hate how there's been such an intense focus on trying to make graphics more realistic. Because of this, I thought it would be amusing to add an option for players to render the world in a pixelated view. However, I dont think simply rendering at a low resolution would create this effect. I want to see something like a 3D mesh be converted into a sprite on the fly while still letting players adjust resolution. I was wondering if anybody had some ideas on a way to go about this. Input, as always, is appreciated. Thanks!

Go look for Mega Man 9 by capcom. It is completely in 8-bit and is a new game coming out soon (I believe).

You could render the hole scene to a low res texture and copy it without any filering to the backbuffer (if you use DirectX with D3DDevice->StretchRect()).
The user can still set the screen resolution to a arbitrary value, but everything will be pixelated.

Hi caldiar, you can try to render the mesh into a texture first then apply a pixelate post process to that texture. You can then additive blend the result (assuming that the clear color when rendering to a texture is black) to the main color buffer. I found a very good pixelate post process effect on NVIDIA's 9.5 sdk effect samples named "scene_tiles". Or you could just use a low resolution texture for your render target and don't do any post processing. I actually tried doing this "old school" effect myself, it's just not perfect yet :D. Cheers.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I'm going to experiment with rendering in low-res to a texture and take a look at the scene_tile postprocess effect.