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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

Something I've learned from discussing computer hardware informally online over the years is that people have vastly different standards for what it means for fans to be "silent" in use. So much so that it's hardly worth discussing, because someone will insist that such and such fan or actively-cooled device is silent, and then you buy it and it sounds like crap. I suspect it's "Cloth Ears" in many cases.

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I think it's not just different standards (quiet = "I can't hear it when blasting Call of Duty at an unhealthy volume") but likely the prevalence of hearing damage. A 30 dB noise is way less noticeable if your threshold of hearing is in the 10-30 dB range instead of the -10 to 10 dB range. Likewise the ability of people to perceive separate noises simultaneously differs.

(Likewise many people say they can't hear the noise ANC headphones produce - it seems likely to me that they're either in a too loud environment so it's masked at all times, have hearing damage or both. It'd be interesting to see the Venn diagram with people who complain you can't turn up phone headphones to be loud enough any more - mumble mumble the EU took it from us! Meanwhile the volume step size of AirPods is too coarse for me because I'm only ever using the lowest four or so "clicks", rarely exceeding 50 dB per HealthKit).

We definitely have different physiological sensitivity to stimuli, and sensitivity can be unintuitive (sounds we can be either made more or less noticeable depending on noise), we also differ in our processing ability and finally our conscious and unconscious ability to direct attention.

This leads to interesting things like for many a white noise source (actually pink noise) nicely blots out most other auditory stimuli by helping direct attention away. Yet the noise source itself heightens sensitivity (why some people find ANC annoying).

Finally some people simply can not direct their attention strongly and it's worsening.

Hypersensitivity it's being swallowed up as an autism trait but many people simply aren't as trained at directing attention than we were in the past since we have such loud hobbies.

Mindfulness does wonders here.

I have terrible hearing (plus age) and I still find most devices have uselessly coarse AND loud volume levels. I almost never exceed the first 2-3 'clicks' unless I want to wake my neighbors. Worst offenders are cheap monitor and/or laptop builtin speakers. I remember one where out of 15 avalable clicks, level 2 was already unbearably loud.

When PulseAudio added "absolute volume control" support, I found out it would sometimes fake in extra clicks in which the actual volume would NOT change, but gave the impression of granularity. Wonders of HDA & usb audio...

> Likewise many people say they can't hear the noise ANC headphones produce - it seems likely to me that they're either in a too loud environment so it's masked at all times, have hearing damage or both.

On my old QC-35 I couldn't hear it, but it's pretty noticeable on the QC-45 I got after those broke.

Half the time it’s because their AirPods are gummed up with earwax and it actually is too quiet.

This happens with eyeballs as well as ears.

Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11, or people who don't mind (or even prefer!) Windows font rendering.

The people who prefer Apple's or Window's font rendering are able to observe it so that's much more subjective preference compared to people who are literally unable to hear e.g. an x570 chipset fan and claim their system is silent

True, I have never in my life noticed screen tearing, X11 or otherwise.

I confess I am somewhat impervious to bad kerning myself. I thought about fixing that (there's online exercises that one can take) but then I realized that there's potentially so much bad kerning out there I would be making my life more miserable for no reason.

https://xkcd.com/1015/

Thanks, I didn’t know this one :)

Screen tearing in X11 is a tricky one since there's a dozen ways to deal with it and 10 times more ways for it to go wrong, which is just enough uncertainty that you can never be sure if it's supposed to be that way. I know I've spent hours trying to deal with screen tearing by fiddling with desktop compositors that are supposed to prevent tearing out of the box only to fall back to the trusty AMDGPU/Radeon TearFree setting which has always just worked for me.

There are driver options to remove screen tearing in X11. (At least for Intel, Nvidia and AMD cards).

Also, font rendering has gotten worse under Linux in recent years (due to fractional scaling).

I should probably just switch to a BSD that doesn't include Wayland support before it is too late. That'd fix my desktop's incessant pulseaudio and systemd screwups too...

Windows font rendering is fine as long as you don't use scaling, right?

Maybe my perceptions are out of date, but cleartype, while technically allowing higher font dpi, had a rainbow/screen door effect that stood out like a sore thumb for many of us.

The effect depends on the screen technology you use. Windows guesses the pixel layout, but you can tweak ClearType to fit your screen better. You can open a wizard that takes you through six steps and asks you to select the rectangle with the best text (out of six rectangles) to tweak it to your liking.

When the subpixels don't align, ClearType can be ugly as hell, but for me the default guesses always worked out.

I wonder if virtualization software messing with how ClearType assumes subpixel layouts could cause a lot of the dislike for ClearType in the Mac crowd, as many Mac users possibly predominately handled Windows in things like Parallels? I don't have any knowledge about how ClearType behaves in software like Parallels so I could be entirely off-base with that idea.

The only time I had dislike for ClearType was when I'd rotate a monitor from landscape to portrait. This makes sense, since the subpixel layout is then wrong. So, I'd usually just redo the ClearType settings when rotated and use the monitor in that orientation for a while instead of constantly switching.

The virtualisation problem may definitely play a role! In my experience, ClearType in a VM is often very very wrong. I think it may even be off by default if Windows can't find details about the current screen.

Alternatively, you may be getting the "RDP" experience for optimized drivers, which is just very blocky.

I prefer ClearType over whatever macOS does (or did, been a while since I had a Hackintosh) but combining different rendering styles is always jarring. Helping Mac people through remote desktop always made the text look wrong to me, probably for the same reason. When you expect text to look a certain way, alternative renderers are always wrong.

This is also something I notice with some custom GUI libraries that implement their own font rendering. I've dropped several GUI tools because I just got frustrated by how their text always looked different from normal text.

On displays with high enough resolution/dpi, maybe. But isn't it just inevitable that if there are red subpixels on one side of your text, and blue on the other, that it would be noticeable?

OK, I played around with it and I was able to make it more and less noticeable depending on which boxes I picked. Guess I'll never know if that was possible when I first started noticing it 20 years ago, with worse monitors and better eyeballs :(

It can still be seen with the correct subpixel layout.

In my observations it’s the reverse. Windows font rendering looks ok to me (if a bit “off”) on my laptop with 1.5x UI scale, but underwhelming at 1.x. At 1.x fonts look badly kerned and a bit misshapen, and that cleans itself up quite a bit at 1.x and beyond.

macOS and Linux rendering looking better to me regardless of render scale. Good kerning and no beating font glyphs into odd shapes to fit a pixel grid on screens with pixel density high enough that it isn’t necessary (we’re not running 1024x768 LCDs any more).

Or people who argued that “the eye can’t see more than 60fps”

Or people who argued that "4k is pointless, you can't see the different with 2k anw".

This really depends on the size of the screen. For most laptops, I'd argue that 4k is useless; 1440p is high-res enough that you get perfect clarity anyway.

For 83" TVs you obviously need more pixels to get a good viewing experience because you don't position yourself several meters in front of the screen to make the pixels unnoticable.

For gaming or videos I actually can’t tell the difference between 4K and 1440p. For text rendering I absolutely can.

As an aside, many 4k/1440p videos are not really 4k or 1440p, vs how we would classify a 4k/1440p monitor. Video is mostly 4k/1440p light levels, but less than that w.r.t. color information.

A common video subsampling setup is 4:2:0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

In addition, common video compression techniques (at least the simple ones that I could still understand) basically reconstruct blocks of pixels. Reconstruction is lossy, at best.

If I had to guess, something similar could be done in games as part of their optimizations.

Something similar is done in video games through two technologies (in addition to colourspace trickery): DLSS and “dynamic resolution”

I think even for phones anything above 1080p, is kinda pointless. Just a drain on the battery.

For me, there's only a difference for the text console. For GUIs I have to halve the resolution to make things usable so it doesn't really help anything.

>Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11

Most people are using a compositor that came with their DE, so screen tearing never happens.

PCs usually aren't completely silent under load anyway (at least none that I've owned). No fan is silent at nominal voltage (and unmodulated) but when slowed down to a low enough RPM they can easily be less audible than GPU coils, many monitors, powered on speakers, room lighting, ... (and "more silent" than a powerful PC's static parts under load).

It's also dependent on the room/building you are in. If you would try the fan in an office type environment (even without any people there) you would probably think it is quiet. But then when you bring it home the fan suddenly sounds very loud.

It's mostly due to the background noise such as active ventilation, air conditioning, other computers/servers/printers with fans etc in the office, which you might not have in your house.

The empty office might seem very quiet, but in terms background fan like noise it's not.

Traffic noise could also be a similar background noise factor.

Pretty hard for "fanless" to make fan noise though!

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