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Comment by BrotherBisquick | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Maybe my perceptions are out of date, but cleartype, while technically allowing higher font dpi, had a rainbow/screen door effect that stood out like a sore thumb for many of us.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

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 :(

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.

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".

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”

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.

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.

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