XNA - How to Disable Bitmap Magnification Blending (Blur)

In working on my code for Conway's Game of Life, I ran into a problem with the default bitmap scaling behavior in XNA. I'm generating a bitmap that I scale to the size of the window. When this bitmap is displayed, it is shown as a blurry mess:


Removing that doggone blending is actually quite simple. You have to modify your spriteBatch.begin() call, and modify the graphics device settings immediately after, like so:

spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend,

SpriteSortMode.Immediate, SaveStateMode.None);

graphics.GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].MagFilter = TextureFilter.None;

The key in the spriteBatch.Begin() call is the SpriteSortMode. Setting this value to immediate causes any changes to the graphics device to be applied immediately. And we want to make a change, as you can see in the next line of code. I'm changing the magnification filter to TextureFilter.None because I don't want it to blue anything. After this, you draw and scale your sprites like normal. The result looks like this:


ahh... much better!