Hacker News Reader

Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

This is an advantage of hiDPI screens that hadn't quite clicked for me before - a throwback to one of the advantages of CRTs, allowing multiple resolutions to look good on a single display.

View on HN

While true, to an extent, it's also the case that resolutions other than native will require some kind of supersampling (eg. AA), unless they divide cleanly into native resolution - a problem CRTs never faced.

This results in both blur (ngligible with a high enough resolution, but doesn't seem to be the case here, seeing the Safari vs Chrome comparison) and a performance hit.

I get the impression that at every "resolution", we're really at the native retina resolution, but with UI widgets scaled to different levels, and different present-day resolutions reported to applications. Can anyone with one of these beauties confirm?

I can can confirm this is false- the resolutions really are different.

Yes, but this just amounts to scaling via the compositor and graphics stack (hardware-accellerated, of course), as opposed to being left to the 'screen' (post-GPU-hardware/firmware) as would be the case when actually driving a screen at non-native resolution.

See the Safari/Chrome comparison in the article to see what this means in real terms...

True, and even CRTs had the issue that if you set a resolution that created interference in the shadow mask it would look like crap. There was a always a 'best' resolution to a CRT even if it was forgiving in terms of different settings.

Given the 'free' GPU we get with machines these days (and by free I mean its always included) it seems reasonable to use its oversampling anti-aliasing feature for desktop display. I'm not sure why you wouldn't do that unless it was some sort of power issue.

The power issue is hugely significant. Using a GPU kills battery life, which is why laptops now have two GPUs -- a low-power basic GPU and a switchable high-power GPU

Reply on news.ycombinator.com