Hacker News Reader

Comment by interpol_p | Hacker News Reader

As the sibling comment states, iOS has used logical points from the very first retina device. And even before then it has never used integers for its UI toolkit coordinate system — there was always the support for fractional coordinates.

The point of the article is that the iPhone 6+ renders to a larger offscreen buffer and then downscales to a 1080p panel. This is the same as the higher resolution modes on Retina Macbook Pros.

View on HN

I haven't developed on iOS in a while so I'm not sure what the state of layouts is at the moment. Why would they render to a higher resolution than scale down if the UI can work with the new native resolution? It doesn't make sense because the output will be worse and a hit to the battery life.

Actually no. The more pixels the screen has the more energy it requires to drive those pixels and so worse battery life. So by having a lower resolution screen and scaling down to fit that screen battery life is improved.

The alternative talked about here is not having the physical screen resolution of 2208x1242 but rather just rendering at 1080p without scaling down.

Displaying in the native resolution would lead to an even curiouser case where the iPhone 6's 4.7" screen displays more content than the iPhone 6+'s 5.5" screen (assuming integer scaling factors of 2x for the 6 and 3x for the 6+).

I do hope that there is some sort of programmable setting or API for enabling native resolution output so that games built with this option are rendering at 1080p and displaying at 1080p, or 1080p movies aren't needlessly being stretched and then downsampled. For legacy apps and not graphically intensive stuff it mostly makes sense to just display at 3x and scale down for simplicities sake, but if the option isn't otherwise there that seems pretty silly.

By rendering to a larger buffer they can ensure that any raster assets may use an integer scale factor between devices. If they rendered to the panel's native resolution (1080p) they'd probably have to use a 2.5x scale factor, which is not desirable.

The output will be slightly worse, but at 400 PPI you probably won't be able to tell without a magnifying glass. The current Retina MBPs do this in their higher res modes and it's pretty hard to notice.

On battery life: perhaps the tradeoff of using a 1080 panel outweighs the scaling.

Also it leaves the door open to switch to a full resolution native panel in an iPhone 7+ with no hit to existing apps or developers.

Huh, I don't know that much about GPU's, but surely they can render fractional pixels directly without downscaling shenanigans. Which actually means that GPU will convert full pixel values to fractional before rendering. Rendering to a larger buffer and then downscaling is actually a form of antialiasing, albeit an inefficient one (if I'm not wrong). Also, rendering without antialias would result in rounded full pixel values. Obviously, bitmaps will be downscaled on the GPU using whatever filters are set for them (just like before, if bitmap is larger than the target size).

It's not so much about the GPU rendering fractional pixels, it's that it makes it much trickier to create neat assets that work at non-integer scale factors. Generally you want to ensure your raster assets have details that lie on integer boundaries at all scale factors, throwing in a non-integer scale factor as a target makes it more difficult to do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com