4 ms·
+1. Subpixel AA seemed quite necessary back in the day with Windows XP and tiny, precisely hinted Tahoma/Verdana/etc. These days, with bigger better bolder fon
by floatboth 7y ago
+1. Subpixel AA seemed quite necessary back in the day with Windows XP and tiny, precisely hinted Tahoma/Verdana/etc.
These days, with bigger better bolder fonts, better renderers, and the departure from pixel-perfect stuff in favor of higher resolutions, subpixel is absolutely unnecessary.
Even on LoDPI screens I turn it off (assign none to lcdfilter in fontconfig) because the color fringes are so ugly. I always notice them.
- Dragory 7y agoSubpixel AA is absolutely not unnecessary these days. I've seen a few programs switch off from it recently (in favor of grayscale AA) and every time it's been noticably more blurry. For example, Discord had a bug that disabled it just a few weeks ago (which has been fixed since), and Twitch's redesign also disabled it in their desktop app (which is why I now use Twitch almost exclusively on Firefox). Both of these apps are based on electron/chromium though, so text rendering, even with grayscale AA, could be better in some other programs. Unless we completely abandon small font sizes or switch exclusively to high-dpi screens (will likely happen eventually, but we're not there yet), subpixel AA can look much sharper than grayscale AA if properly configured and you're not sensitive to the color fringes (personally, sitting at about an arm's length from my monitor, I don't notice them at all). And I'd rather not have text rendering quality suddenly downgraded on my existing peripherals before that happens.