>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out.
That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pro right now, and the difference in how well the text renders on the two displays is plain.
I guess as soon as Apple started making laptops with 300dpi screens, it became okay to render fuzzy text on any screen that wasn't 300dpi.
This results in less crisp output than you would get if you actually rendered vector based UI at the exact monitor resolution or if you natively rendered bitmap art 1:1 with the monitor resolution.
This approach makes sense when you're only using Apples monitors because they can optimize their internal "native" resolutions for the handful of actual native resolutions they offer, but it falls apart when you start plugging in external third party lower dpi monitors.
(I believe this is also the same approach that Gnome 3 uses to do (experimental, with a toggle) non integer multiple UI scaling.)
And I had that Dell's first 24" 4K screen that required DP MST to go past 30Hz. I've tried disabling subpixel rendering to see if that resolution was really sufficient (185dpi) but you could then see text regain jagged edges. Thus I reasoned that, with my glasses correcting my myopia to better than 20/20, I needed to wait a while until I can fully enjoy nice, laser-printout-like text.
As a reminder, even laser printers printing at 600dpi use techniques similar to subpixel rendering to render that smooth text.
I am hoping for some 8K screens at 32" for productivity work (though that's still probably too low at 275 dpi), and I never get it why people keep talking about there not being any 8K content. My desktop is my 8K content, though I also lack the GPU to drive it at more than 30Hz :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Refresh_frequency_limits_...
Thanks for a very clear and direct source for the bandwidth, I was under the impression HDMI 2.1 would not require DSC for 8k at 60Hz but never paid attention to the actual numbers.
DP 2.0 is what I need to wait for then :) What was the bandwidth it promises? 77Gbps, should work.
Then again, I feel like eGPUs are the way forward for this, as you can keep the GPU close to the screen, and your computer would talk a "semantically compressed" (or rather terser) language to the display output (eg. talk OpenGL to your display).
Some programs let you use pixel-perfect fonts, even today. For example, in iterm2 I do "Profiles > Text > Monaco Regular 10pt non-antialiased"
Whatever setup was there on Ubuntu 20.04 which made text render clearly needs to come back (I used to use slight hinting setting, but it seems subpixel rendering is going away on Linux too). Please!
Switch to the X session on the login screen and you should have good scaling again (also, lots of applications that do screen sharing, like Zoom, do not work on Wayland [5]). Or just be like me and use Mint, which has no plans for Wayland support and you don't have to think about any of this.
[0]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wa...
[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractio...
[3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
[4]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
[5]: https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharin...
Linux & Windows generally use implementations of antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract away the details for you
It was better on previous versions, I think Mojave was the last good one.
Then I upgraded my son's laptop to Ubuntu 22.04 RC, and I was greeted with the same fuzziness. I hope that's only due to Wayland, I haven't tried out the X desktop when docked.
macOS is really limited when in comes to displays, because the display must have a PPI of around 110, or a multiple of that. It sucks how bad macOS is at scaling, especially with the terrible font rendering.
The world in which we now live allows for a lot more crispness when it matters (because the pixel density approaches indistinguishable-by-the-human-eye-at-viewing-distance), but with the tradeoff that UIs designed to work at whatever scale on whatever monitor with whatever DPI do a lot of aliasing, and things tend to look, sometimes, just a tad muddier. Especially when vectorized icons get drawn in a rendering pipe that passes through the graphics accelerator.
The alternative is that you convert the vector line with a "nearest neighbour" pixel algorithm (or cleverer but fundamentally similar algorithms e.g. [1]) but then you get the aliasing artefacts that anti-aliasing is meant to avoid. For example, two parallel lines that are rendered 2.5 pixels apart might end up having a gap between them that alternates between 1 and 2 pixels along its length, which looks even worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm
With hand-designed pixel graphics, this isn't a problem because you can manually choose to draw everything an integer number of pixels apart or avoid certain constructions altogether.
I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause - more of design sensibility. When I look at the lineup of google apps on my phone which all look EXACTLY the same (3 primary colours in random rotation; I can only effectively use / distinguish them if I memorize location of icon), and then the same as slack and my son's daycare app which also use swirls of same 3 primary colours; and when I compare my Windows desktop and icons and browsers to old apps - there's a definite brutal sharpness to old stuff.