4 ms·

It's not correct because you are not rendering at 2/3 scale anymore, you are rendering at 0.665 or 0.67 scale. What you are describing is rounding, you can't do

It's not correct because you are not rendering at 2/3 scale anymore, you are rendering at 0.665 or 0.67 scale. What you are describing is rounding, you can't do this without rounding. Worse, with that method the scale technically changes every time you resize the window. This is hard to explain in text on HN and I don't have reference images to illustrate this at the moment, sorry.

pedrocr 6y ago
> It's not correct because you are not rendering at 2/3 scale anymore, you are rendering at 0.665 or 0.67 scale. You won't get the same result as rendering the entire screen at the same scale because you're snapping windows to integer borders. But that's the whole point. The app however is scaling at 2/3 within that window box and that's actually what you want because it gives better results. There's nothing special about scaling the whole screen that you can't do by scaling each individual window after first snapping all windows to integer sizes.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  If the app is still rendering into that box at 2/3 scale, then it is either cutting off pixels at the bottom or you will get a seam at the bottom.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    Only if the app is broken. The rendering engine needs to be able to fill whatever pixel size at whatever scale. If you mean that you can no longer do 2x and scale down at the exact perfect scale then that's true, but only a limitation of that way of rendering. It's also broken for whole screen scaling, just less noticeable. Firefox and Chrome don't have that issue at all for example, and neither does anything that renders fonts and vectors. At a guess this is probably where all this came from. GTK decided integer scaling was all it was going to support and then everything else was decided as if all clients behaved like that. I doubt even that's a problem. The differences in scale from doing 2x and scale down per-app instead of per-screen are miniscule.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      There is no "non-broken" way that an app can consistently render at a real number scale into an integer sized buffer. Everything is going to have rounding or blurring in some way. This is unavoidable. If you follow the email I linked a while ago, this was mostly a decision in Weston, not really particularly related to GTK. But if you want to follow the conversation on where Gnome is at with this, see here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/478 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/478 The end comments there are what I'm getting at, the only reliable way to do this is to just bypass scaling completely and have something where the client says "never scale my buffer at all on any monitor." But of course that has the same issues with mixed DPI and you would only really want to use it for performance-sensitive applications that are not particularly sensitive to scale.
      - pedrocr 6y ago
        > There is no "non-broken" way that an app can consistently render at a real number scale into an integer sized buffer. Everything is going to have rounding or blurring in some way. This is unavoidable. This is just not true. There's nothing special about 1x and 2x when you're rendering a font or a vector. 1.5x may very well be the scale at which everything snaps into the pixel grid because that's how the pt->px conversion happened to play out at that given DPI. Thinking of 1x and 2x rendering as being special cases is exactly the problem here. And even for things where you want to pixel align if you leave that to the client some can make more intelligent decisions. There's nothing stopping a UI library snapping everything to the pixel grid at arbitrary scales by varying the spacing between elements slightly between steps. That's the whole point, the client can do better things in a lot of cases and while the discussion was about Weston the Wayland protocol has ended up with this limitation, which makes sense since Weston is the reference implementation. There's currently no way for a client to request the scale factor of the screen and render directly at that factor. > But of course that has the same issues with mixed DPI and you would only really want to use it for performance-sensitive applications that are not particularly sensitive to scale. There's no problem with mixed-DPI. If you have a 1x screen and a 1.5x screen render at 1.5x and scale down in the lower screen when spanning two screens. When in one screen exclusively render directly at 1x or 1.5x.

pedrocr 6y ago

> It's not correct because you are not rendering at 2/3 scale anymore, you are rendering at 0.665 or 0.67 scale. You won't get the same result as rendering the entire screen at the same scale because you're snapping windows to integer borders. But that's the whole point. The app however is scaling at 2/3 within that window box and that's actually what you want because it gives better results. There's nothing special about scaling the whole screen that you can't do by scaling each individual window after first snapping all windows to integer sizes.

cycloptic 6y ago
If the app is still rendering into that box at 2/3 scale, then it is either cutting off pixels at the bottom or you will get a seam at the bottom.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  Only if the app is broken. The rendering engine needs to be able to fill whatever pixel size at whatever scale. If you mean that you can no longer do 2x and scale down at the exact perfect scale then that's true, but only a limitation of that way of rendering. It's also broken for whole screen scaling, just less noticeable. Firefox and Chrome don't have that issue at all for example, and neither does anything that renders fonts and vectors. At a guess this is probably where all this came from. GTK decided integer scaling was all it was going to support and then everything else was decided as if all clients behaved like that. I doubt even that's a problem. The differences in scale from doing 2x and scale down per-app instead of per-screen are miniscule.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    There is no "non-broken" way that an app can consistently render at a real number scale into an integer sized buffer. Everything is going to have rounding or blurring in some way. This is unavoidable. If you follow the email I linked a while ago, this was mostly a decision in Weston, not really particularly related to GTK. But if you want to follow the conversation on where Gnome is at with this, see here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/478 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/478 The end comments there are what I'm getting at, the only reliable way to do this is to just bypass scaling completely and have something where the client says "never scale my buffer at all on any monitor." But of course that has the same issues with mixed DPI and you would only really want to use it for performance-sensitive applications that are not particularly sensitive to scale.
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      > There is no "non-broken" way that an app can consistently render at a real number scale into an integer sized buffer. Everything is going to have rounding or blurring in some way. This is unavoidable. This is just not true. There's nothing special about 1x and 2x when you're rendering a font or a vector. 1.5x may very well be the scale at which everything snaps into the pixel grid because that's how the pt->px conversion happened to play out at that given DPI. Thinking of 1x and 2x rendering as being special cases is exactly the problem here. And even for things where you want to pixel align if you leave that to the client some can make more intelligent decisions. There's nothing stopping a UI library snapping everything to the pixel grid at arbitrary scales by varying the spacing between elements slightly between steps. That's the whole point, the client can do better things in a lot of cases and while the discussion was about Weston the Wayland protocol has ended up with this limitation, which makes sense since Weston is the reference implementation. There's currently no way for a client to request the scale factor of the screen and render directly at that factor. > But of course that has the same issues with mixed DPI and you would only really want to use it for performance-sensitive applications that are not particularly sensitive to scale. There's no problem with mixed-DPI. If you have a 1x screen and a 1.5x screen render at 1.5x and scale down in the lower screen when spanning two screens. When in one screen exclusively render directly at 1x or 1.5x.