5 ms·

I still don't understand how the removal of subpixel rendering in macOS 10.14 is not yet reversed. I can visually relax much more when I work on my 10.11 El Cap

I still don't understand how the removal of subpixel rendering in macOS 10.14 is not yet reversed. I can visually relax much more when I work on my 10.11 El Capitan systems.

TehCorwiz 6y ago
As screens gain resolution pixels get smaller. At some point there's a trade-off between computation power and effect. At some point sub-pixel rendering is indistinguishable from pure integer pixel rendering to the human eye on higher-resolution screens. 100% speculation: Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It's possible that they're ignoring "legacy" devices in these decisions with the justification probably being that "They'll buy a new one eventually anyway." Edit: added missing words.
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  >Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It has no such history, quite the opposite. You can install the latest OS on 5 year old phones and 8 year old Macs.
  - danhor 6y ago
    I mean, that's only the latest few generations. Android is worse for sure, but Windows does seem to support old PCs as long as the specs aren't as so bad as to be beaten by an older raspberry pi.
    - tambourine_man 6y ago
      > I mean, that's only the latest few generations. What do you mean by few? Apple releases new phones every single year and has for the past 12. 5 years means 5 generations.
crazygringo 6y ago
Because 1) the Mac world has moved onto high-DPI screens mainly, 2) subpixel rendering provides virtually no benefit on high-DPI screens, and 3) subpixel rendering adds a ton of complications across the board (you can't scale anything, for starters), and was always hacky to begin with -- e.g. taking a screenshot and putting it on the internet gives it a rainbow halo effect on everyone else's screen Honestly, these days with graphics cards that support Retina, the "right" way to do subpixel rendering on non-Retina screens wouldn't be with fonts at all. It would be to render everything internally normally at 3x resolution (3x horizontal by 1x vertical), and then apply subpixel rendering to the whole screen when downscaling for display. But with so few non-Retina screens being used by Mac users, why bother?
- xenonite 6y ago
  Thank you for your explanations. I particularly like your comment on down scaling the triple resolution. Actually I am using a Retina display. I’m still noticing the difference very much. Hence I don’t think subpixel rendering would be only a technique for obsolete devices. But I don’t think subpixel rendering is a performance issue, my MacBook Pro running 10.11 displays everything fast even though being 6 years old. And if the complications were already there, perfectly working, why remove them? I understand that it is hard to add these features into the iOS libraries, but then the others should have been kept as is.
  - galad87 6y ago
    It wasn't "perfectly working", there was a lot of text on translucent views either looking horrible or changing antialiasing type when animated on macOS.
    - xenonite 6y ago
      I was not aware of that. On the other hand, I am mainly looking at static text with opaque background (including PDFs). At least there, the subpixel hinting would benefit the keen readers' eyes.

I still don't understand how the removal of subpixel rendering in macOS 10.14 is not yet reversed. I can visually relax much more when I work on my 10.11 El Capitan systems.

TehCorwiz 6y ago

As screens gain resolution pixels get smaller. At some point there's a trade-off between computation power and effect. At some point sub-pixel rendering is indistinguishable from pure integer pixel rendering to the human eye on higher-resolution screens. 100% speculation: Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It's possible that they're ignoring "legacy" devices in these decisions with the justification probably being that "They'll buy a new one eventually anyway." Edit: added missing words.

tambourine_man 6y ago
>Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It has no such history, quite the opposite. You can install the latest OS on 5 year old phones and 8 year old Macs.
- danhor 6y ago
  I mean, that's only the latest few generations. Android is worse for sure, but Windows does seem to support old PCs as long as the specs aren't as so bad as to be beaten by an older raspberry pi.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    > I mean, that's only the latest few generations. What do you mean by few? Apple releases new phones every single year and has for the past 12. 5 years means 5 generations.

crazygringo 6y ago

Because 1) the Mac world has moved onto high-DPI screens mainly, 2) subpixel rendering provides virtually no benefit on high-DPI screens, and 3) subpixel rendering adds a ton of complications across the board (you can't scale anything, for starters), and was always hacky to begin with -- e.g. taking a screenshot and putting it on the internet gives it a rainbow halo effect on everyone else's screen Honestly, these days with graphics cards that support Retina, the "right" way to do subpixel rendering on non-Retina screens wouldn't be with fonts at all. It would be to render everything internally normally at 3x resolution (3x horizontal by 1x vertical), and then apply subpixel rendering to the whole screen when downscaling for display. But with so few non-Retina screens being used by Mac users, why bother?

xenonite 6y ago
Thank you for your explanations. I particularly like your comment on down scaling the triple resolution. Actually I am using a Retina display. I’m still noticing the difference very much. Hence I don’t think subpixel rendering would be only a technique for obsolete devices. But I don’t think subpixel rendering is a performance issue, my MacBook Pro running 10.11 displays everything fast even though being 6 years old. And if the complications were already there, perfectly working, why remove them? I understand that it is hard to add these features into the iOS libraries, but then the others should have been kept as is.
- galad87 6y ago
  It wasn't "perfectly working", there was a lot of text on translucent views either looking horrible or changing antialiasing type when animated on macOS.
  - xenonite 6y ago
    I was not aware of that. On the other hand, I am mainly looking at static text with opaque background (including PDFs). At least there, the subpixel hinting would benefit the keen readers' eyes.