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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

This Samsung [1] is only 14" and yet has 2880x1800 display. That's 200% resolution. Anything less than 200% is not interesting to me. iPhone with Retina display debuted in 2010. Isn't 13 years enough time for PC laptops to catch up?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPJWYQSY/

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It's ~190ppi and retina is about 200 with laptops. What's the big deal? Also the lower the resolution is the higher fps can be hit in games.

This 16 inch laptop has 2560x1600 resolution. If you set it to 200% then that's the equivalent of 800 pixels which is what you expect in a 13 inch laptop. For a 16 inch laptop there's not enough pixels.

Why set it to 200%? Because as Steve Jobs has explained, the only resolution that looks good after 100% is 200%. Then 400%. If you set it any in-between scale (such as 150% or 300%) then you will have display artifacts, such as horizontal lines appearing to have different widths when they are all in fact set to 1px.

> If you set it any in-between scale (such as 150% or 300%) then you will have display artifacts, such as horizontal lines appearing to have different widths when they are all in fact set to 1px.

This is only true with the approach macOS takes. When set to 150% on macOS the app renders at 200% and the compositor downscales. On Windows however there is no downscaling: the app renders directly at 150% thus avoiding any artifacts.

That is only true for apps where everything is vectors and it knows about scaling, since apps draw to the pixel buffer themselves. Many contain rasterized resources with fixed resolutions.

Weird... I have only ever seen this artifact on Windows machines, never on a Mac.

Fortunately on Windows and Linux you don't have to scale the same way as Apple does pixel doubling everything. And even Apple has shipped laptops where the default display resolution is not a integer scale of the panel resolution (e.g 12" MacBook).

I have been to BestBuy and tried out laptops with non-integer scaling (150% or even 300%) and observed the display artifact I mentioned previously.

There are no artifacts at 300% resolution – that's exactly 3x3 real pixels per CSS pixel.

Don't forget that lower FPS also means less battery usage.

What does "200%" resolution mean?

I prefer displays with a resolution where I don't have to do any scaling honestly.

200% means double the resolution of the "previous era" (1990s and 2000s), which was around 96 dpi. Modern applications will not see any scaling artifacts.

Applications from the "previous era" that are not HighDPI-aware will get scaling... each application pixel will occupy 4 physical pixels.

I guess you're lucky that Apple and Samsungs have laptops that you like.

...and Asus... and Dell.. among others

yeah this Asus laptop (https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-home/vivobook/vivobook-pro-...) has the same resolution display for the same dimensions too. Maybe this is the only high dpi panel mass produced enough and 16'' doesn't have an economical version due to lower economies of scale? just a guess I am not very sure.

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