Hacker News Reader

Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we finally have resolution independent displays??

View on HN

Safari is multi-process now, and Web pages run sandboxed by the OS. Does that count as an invisible part of Lion?

Resolution independence - IMO that's never gonna happen. Apple will do the pixel-doubling thing, I reckon.

Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: (http://netkas.org/?p=609)

>Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support

Which is weird, because resolution independence has been part of Mac OS X since 10.5. Only if developer tools are installed though, and it never really worked with Carbon applications, but those are slowly vanishing anyway.

I just activated it again to see how it looks and.. well, it could look better :) I tried the preferences and I've to admit I think they looked better (scaled up) in 10.5 than on 10.6.

OpenGL 3.2, huh? Well, I guess it's better than nothing, but had a faint hope Apple will skip ahead to 4.0 or even 4.1. Next time around it seems.

Intel's HD 3000 seems to only support OpenGL 3. NVidia's 320M and 330M are likewise limited to OpenGL 3.3 (according to wikipedia, NVidia's own spec pages only talks about 2.1[0]). I'm not sure it makes as much sense to support that.

[0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html

Apple has used LLVM in the past to run more advanced OpenGL implementations on lesser hardware - their Intel 950 graphic driver was one example of this:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649...

Of course, this only covered vertex processing and other compute-intensive tasks, and thus wouldn't apply to many other OpenGL features.

You reckon correcly; Lion apparently has support for 'HiDPI' mode, which is essentially pixel doubling.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-i...

I haven't seen it mentioned, but if anyone gets official word about TRIM support, please let me know.

It's been suggested that OS X might not actually need TRIM support (for reasons not entirely understood): http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe...

TRIM hasn't been necessary in years, and definitely not with modern SSDs. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092456

Reply on news.ycombinator.com