4 ms·

> (Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resample

> (Think of the iPhone 6+, where software can’t even address the native screen pixels, and literally everything gets rendered to one size grid and then resampled for a different display grid.) This isn't really how this works. If everything was being upsampled, youd see obvious jaggies and upsampling artifacts. The only reason iOS can do this reasonably well is because the actual resolution is exactly 2x or 3x the resolution presented to the software. The actual rendering takes place at native resolution; graphics assets are produced in the native resolution. Upsampled rendering/assets look very obviously bad. > The only thing stopping us is technical fluency with rectangular grids, and cultural/historical inertia. These are factors, but theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good.

mark-r 10y ago
I thought the genius of Apple resizing was that everything is resampled down, not up.
jacobolus 10y ago
> The only reason iOS can do this reasonably well is because the actual resolution is exactly 2x or 3x the resolution presented to the software. On the iPhone 6+, this is not accurate. Most apps are rendered to a 1242 × 2208 pixel resolution (3× the “logical” 414 × 736 resolution) and then downsampled to the screen’s physical 1080 × 1920 resolution afterward. On OS X, the default behavior for “retina” displays is to render everything precisely to screen pixels at 2x the “logical” size, but users can alternatively select a different virtual display size, whereupon all content will be resampled for display. > theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good Every photographic or video image you look at on your computer or phone has been resampled to different pixel grids several times in the course of its production, and is typically resampled one final time when rendered to screen. There is thus lots of evidence that we can relatively seamlessly resample just about everything, and only dedicated pixel peepers will care strongly. As for non-photographic content like line art, maps, text, rendered video game output, etc., we could just render these directly to a different grid.

mark-r 10y ago

I thought the genius of Apple resizing was that everything is resampled down, not up.

jacobolus 10y ago

> The only reason iOS can do this reasonably well is because the actual resolution is exactly 2x or 3x the resolution presented to the software. On the iPhone 6+, this is not accurate. Most apps are rendered to a 1242 × 2208 pixel resolution (3× the “logical” 414 × 736 resolution) and then downsampled to the screen’s physical 1080 × 1920 resolution afterward. On OS X, the default behavior for “retina” displays is to render everything precisely to screen pixels at 2x the “logical” size, but users can alternatively select a different virtual display size, whereupon all content will be resampled for display. > theres also not much evidence that resampling from arbitrary virtual to physical resolutions will actually look good Every photographic or video image you look at on your computer or phone has been resampled to different pixel grids several times in the course of its production, and is typically resampled one final time when rendered to screen. There is thus lots of evidence that we can relatively seamlessly resample just about everything, and only dedicated pixel peepers will care strongly. As for non-photographic content like line art, maps, text, rendered video game output, etc., we could just render these directly to a different grid.