Microsoft’s Windows 10 will support up to 8K displays | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s Windows 10 will support up to 8K displays

extremetech.com

55 pointsDiabloD363 comments

Why is support limited at all?

I would have thought that displaying up to N pixels - where N is much higher than the number of pixels in an 8K display - would generally be possible.

My guess is that the OS assets would have to be redone after that. We are still stuck using pixel art for lots of things, and it is nice to have some standards until vector is good enough for everything.

Why isn't vector good enough?

Because you still have to rasterise it, which is a relatively slow operation, and considering rendering the OS assets is one of the most common tasks you will perform, it probably needs to be a very fast routine

Would it not be more efficient to produce the correctly scaled bitmaps once, then cache the output?

Yeah, just render it on resolution change.

It's not that simple. Normally you render significantly upscaled stuff in an off-screen buffer and then downscale it for the best possible appearance for every single frame. There are some ratios you need to keep, or you'd end up with Linux-style graphics "quality" (try scaling factor other than 1.0). If you just scale icon/bitmap once without thinking about this, it would look most likely ugly after upscaling/downscaling steps (unless you got lucky).

That's mainly an issue at low resolutions.

It's like when you learn how to notice aliasing artifacts in photos taken with DSLRs. It cannot be unseen. So even if those issues are mostly noticeable in low-res, you "cannot unsee" them in higher resolutions anymore either.

The bigger problem is decent renderings at lower resolution. My wife did a lot of red lining for low-end Nokia phones. Even at the higher end, you still need to carefully produce bitmaps (make in Illustrator, red line the bits in PhotoShop). Now, this becomes easier at higher resolutions, but you still need to do it, I think (fonts are all hinted to avoid artifacts, some basic shapes are fine, but do anything complicated and you'll begin to notice jaggies that you can eliminate with a hand tuned bitmap...).

Vectors are not a panacea.

http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...

(Among other articles about this topic).

Having said that, I still wish they were better supported in modern OSes as a hybrid solution because while they start to fall apart at small sizes they do handle the scaling in the other direction (which is what this topic is mostly about here anyway) well, certainly better than just upsampling a bitmap icon.

I think this is more for 8k displays that scale down to sub-8k resolutions. Basically supporting higher DPI devices.

I guess it's for similar reasons that different Windows editions support different amounts of memory and CPUs and XP didn't get DirectX 10

They limit features so there's reason to buy new versions.

Probably because Windows already has the worst resolution scaling system of all operating systems, and developers basically have to support every single resolution that would appear in hardware. So they try to limit the resolutions to make it somewhat more manageable (even if it still remains the OS with the worst resolution scaling system).

As depicted in the chart in the article, 8k resolution only makes sense for displays that are very large or very close. 8k is where we stop increasing resolution and start increasing field of view, which is going to require some UI changes: games and movies will be about the only thing that should take up the full screen, popup notifications in the corner of the screen might not even catch the eye if you're working in a window on the other side of the screen, and eye/head tracking might become really useful.

4K on a 28" monitor is only 150 DPI. It is a step up, but not as nice to look at as a rMBP 220 DPI screen (you can see the pixels everywhere!). The retina iMac has to go to 5K to look as nice as an rMBP.

After we go to 5K, why not 8K on a 27" screen?

4K belongs on a 24" monitor to meet "Retina" standards imho (due to 1080p's standard monitor size is 24").

You aren't going to look at a monitor from the same distance as at your phone or rMBP. "Retina" is a function of distance. 1x1m pixel is retina when viewed from 1km ;-)

Retina is merely doubling the existing accepted DPI for any device and using it as an integer scaled HiDPI device. I look at my 24" 1920x1080 ("1080p"), so doubling the DPI would give me 3840x2160 ("4k").

My 24" is already at the optimum distance (approximately 29" away), so I'm not sure why you bring up distance here.

Also, my 13" MBP Retina sits under my center monitor, so yes, I do in fact look at it at the same distance (although the optimum distance is approximately 23" for that).

As for 27" screens, their res is typically 2560x1440, thus 5120x2880 ("5k") would be the correct res, and what 27" iMac Retinas ship with (optimum distance is about 24").

The “retina” iMac is 5120 by 2880 pixels at 27" diagonal, or 218 pixels per inch. (And it’s amazing.)

4K (3840 by 2160) is pretty nice on a 24" display, but I’d rather have a 20–22" diagonal for it.

At “8K” resolution (i.e. 7680 by 4320 pixels), you’ll get a great result for a display at like 40–44 inches diagonal (220–200 pixels per inch), or even 50", as with such a big display you’ll tend to stay a bit further back.

I'm yearning for the day when we can't tell if something is printed or rendered on a computer display. We need to get rid of the backlight, so maybe e-ink or OLED, and then...8K might just be good enough.

8K is unlikely to surface in consumer desktops and laptops within the duration of Microsoft's usual OS upgrade cycle. Does this imply Windows 10 will be supported for longer? I supposed it's either that or Microsoft finally intends on pushing the resolution envelope.

Or its some cheap future proofing like when they added support for 4k sector drives in Vista, or 256TB drives in Windows XP?

I agree that that is the most likely reason. I may have also overestimated how likely the alternative interpretations were from the tone of the announcement.

I'm more baffled by the 768 x 768 icons. That's more than the entire VGA resolution.

Apple has required 1024x1024 icons for all apps in the App Store since 2012: http://www.cultofmac.com/179738/apple-now-requires-high-res-...

So it's not that baffling.

Is not that just scaling issue? used 8k virtual display onh Windows 7 without problems. (multi-display setup, thanks to AMD Eyefinity Windows see only one large screen).

Why not 16k? Microsoft has never done too well with the forward looking bit. We were stuck at 1080p because software did not support more, and there was no demand for monitors and vice versa. Cell phones and Macs validated the market, and 5 years later, MS starts to catch up. 8k displays are now coming out, so Microsoft adds support without looking forward another few years.

How many people have 16k monitors? They can add that in Windows 11 or 12.

This would be for the Surface Hub presumably, which has an 84inch screen. Future versions of it could easily get to 8k

8k is useful for vr headsets where you are just a few cm from the display, yet need a wide field of view.

Does this really mean anything until applications start supporting these resolutions?

SQL Server Management Studio is basically unusable for me on my retina Macbook Pro.

It will be nice to have proper text scaling however.

"Microsoft Windows will support displays with up to 8K resolution" would be better, as using 8K displays would be only useful for the Matrix Architect.

Of course, nobody needs more than 640K of memory either.

Seriously, though, although I'm sure 4K will become somewhat commonplace in 10 years, the rate of progress for desktop screens is ridiculous compared to the mobile world. I still don't quite understand what stops us from making cheap, large arrays, when we can make the tiniest, most colourful pixels to keep in our pockets. Is it just the general market being completely ignorant/indifferent to good monitors?

I'm ready for my 4x8 panels to be installed directly against wall studs, in lieu of drywall. Modern display resolution is jaw-dropping to me.

For a moment I thought it would support 8 thousand displays simultaneously... Could probably change wording to "displays up to 8K"

Then for a moment would you think it was about extremely cold displays limited to -265.15 degrees Celsius?

Will the icons and other text scale seamlessly or do I need a magnifying glass?

They already do -- Windows 8.1 looks great on a high-DPI display and most apps support it. (Although it's annoyingly obvious when you run an old app that doesn't, because its window gets upscaled and the text is visibly blurry.)

Thanks Pavlov for pointing at the new high dpi support.

I'm looking forward for a 8K, 16 bit per pixel, 120 Hz, 3D display.

Up to 8K displays? Other than those Bloomberg terminal guys, who needs more than 3 displays?

It's about the display with 8K resolution, not 8 thousand monitors. Good to see that they are prepare to be future-proof for the next 5-10 years.

Your parent was making fun of the ambiguous (maybe even incorrect) headline. Compare to:

Microsoft’s Windows 10 will support displays up to 8K

8k is considered to be the final resolution for digital displays as it should be sufficient for people with the best vision.

Then someone will invent a 4th primary colour.

Already there for tetrachromatics like Concetta Antico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico

I don't believe that for a second. My 5" phone has 1920x1080 resolution and it was a very noticeable step up in quality. Assuming the dpi of my phone is near the limit of what is necessary, it'd take more than 8K to fill my field of view with displays at the same DPI.

> My 5" phone has 1920x1080 resolution and it was a very noticeable step up in quality.

Compared to?

The 1280x720 resolution 4.6" phone it replaced.

How far do you hold your phone from the eyes? Now compare it to your regular TV - how far do you watch it from? With 55" 4k UHD you'd get retina-style appearance from 1.5m upwards.

Two issues with that:

For movie watching people keep wanting bigger screens. You can buy 80" TV's, and then come projectors.

Secondly, my main screen use is for monitors, where I am only about twice the distance away from how I typically hold my phone.

So you're saying that 8K ought to be enough for anybody?

Basically that's the mood in the industry for the past 5 years or so.

I am using a 31" Cine 4k 10-bit monitor and barring the very latest M.2 PCIe SSDs, I can't even get realtime playback of uncompressed 14-bit RAW 4k@24fps footage on a top-end system (60fps is a sci-fi). Not to mention a top-end NVidia GPU won't allow me to smoothly run any recent game in best settings in 4k or UHD, experiencing occasional signal drop-outs while driving 4k x 2k @ 60Hz via DP or miniDP with expensive cables, slow progress of CPU performance improvements since 2004, and indeed it looks like it might be the case 8k will be the final digital TV resolution unless some dramatic technological change occurs. Cinemas with their large screens seem to be doing just fine with 4k.

My 55" UHD TV shows noticeable improvements only when I stand closer than 1.5m, subconsciously I have a feeling of a better picture quality under 3m distance while driving 4:4:4 UHD@60Hz from a computer via HDMI 2.0 (YMMV)

"it should be sufficient for people with the best vision"

Sitting within 30cm on the screen I guess?

Maybe it opens up a whole new lucrative market - from audiophiles to screenophiles ;-)

Which is a self-correcting problem for "people with the best vision" :)

Thanks to Moore's law, and desks surface growing 2x every 18 months, we won't have to wait long to really enjoy Win 10 to the fullest.

My office desk is still the same size.

But it has a lower TDP.

Personally I find 4 to be the comfortable minimum for using adobe after-effects.

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