4 ms·

Any font rendering looks amazing on HiDPI panels. Have you ever used macOS on a normal monitor? The text looks worse than anything else.

mikl 5y ago
For some value of “normal”. 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks. After a decade of “retina” screens, I’m ruined, I can’t stand the look of anti-aliased fonts, whether Windows, Linux or macOS.
- von_lohengramm 5y ago
  > 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks. This is the hardware solution to something that can be solved in software. If your game is laggy, of course upgrading to a 3090 is going to help, but that doesn't mean you're solving the problem.
  - azornathogron 5y ago
    It can't be solved in software, due to the Nyquist limit: Sharp high-contrast edges (text) necessarily have high frequencies, and you need a high sampling rate (pixel density) to produce a good approximation of that signal. People have spent a lot of effort to push anti-aliasing techniques as far as they can go, but displays with higher pixel density are just better for displaying text. I agree that if you are making something and your target audience will be using non-HiDPI displays, then you should actually design your thing on those displays too. But no matter how good your software is, pixel density places a limit on what you can achieve.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Pixel-perfect rendering (i.e. hinting) is needed in order to reach the Nyquist limit. By forgoing it, you're limiting yourself to an effective resolution that's only 0.7× or so the physical one,
    - mrob 5y ago
      Bitmap fonts (and hinted fonts are automatically generated bitmap fonts) are pixel art, so the Nyquist limit doesn't apply. In pixel art, the pixels are treated as little squares or rectangles, not band-limited point samples. This means you sacrifice the ability to display arbitrary shapes, but I'm not trying to reproduce printed text so I don't care. I have perfectly sharp text on a 1080p monitor because I disable antialiasing in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf and force full hinting.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        Nitpicking, but a pixel is always a point sample, not a little square. The native medium for displaying pixel art is CRT displays, where these point samples are used to control an electron gun that introduces a Gaussian blur, basically the best case for purely analog upsampling (or DAC, rather) of a pixel raster. No little squares in sight, though! What you're talking about is using pixel-perfect control to reach the Nyquist limit, as mentioned in my sibling comment.
        mrob 5y ago
        Pixel art is defined by treating pixels as little squares. There is no single native medium for displaying pixel art. The same techniques were used for games on portable systems with LCD displays. Additionally, there are many examples of printed art using blocky pixels. The Nyquist limit is irrelevant to pixel art, because the Nyquist limit applies only to reconstructing signals from point samples. Using pixel art on a monochrome LCD (no subpixels), I can display signals with maximum frequency limited only by the sharpness of the edges of the little squares.
jabbany 5y ago
This. The devs and designers are all using 4k, 5k displays these days. Trying to use modern apps etc. on just "FHD" (1080p) displays is painful.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Over 2/3 of regular users are still using 1080p[1]. If your design looks bad on FHD then it looks bad to most people. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
  - lmm 5y ago
    Right, but it looks good on the designer's screen. That's the issue.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Just like programmers should have to run their apps on 10 year old computers and feel the pain, so should designers have to try their work on 10 year old monitors.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >Over 2/3 of regular users That isn't going to be the case for Apple users though is it. Apple don't have any non retina devices in their lineup now. The only Apple users who will see a low dpi display are those plugging in a low dpi external monitor. They are going to be a minority.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    Perhaps a better survey would be the one by Firefox[0] since it isn't biased towards gamers. Basically HiDPI monitors are like a combined 2% of all Firefox users. 1080p usage is lower than on Steam but that is because 768p usage is higher :-P. [0] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
- 5y ago

mikl 5y ago

For some value of “normal”. 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks. After a decade of “retina” screens, I’m ruined, I can’t stand the look of anti-aliased fonts, whether Windows, Linux or macOS.

von_lohengramm 5y ago
> 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks. This is the hardware solution to something that can be solved in software. If your game is laggy, of course upgrading to a 3090 is going to help, but that doesn't mean you're solving the problem.
- azornathogron 5y ago
  It can't be solved in software, due to the Nyquist limit: Sharp high-contrast edges (text) necessarily have high frequencies, and you need a high sampling rate (pixel density) to produce a good approximation of that signal. People have spent a lot of effort to push anti-aliasing techniques as far as they can go, but displays with higher pixel density are just better for displaying text. I agree that if you are making something and your target audience will be using non-HiDPI displays, then you should actually design your thing on those displays too. But no matter how good your software is, pixel density places a limit on what you can achieve.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Pixel-perfect rendering (i.e. hinting) is needed in order to reach the Nyquist limit. By forgoing it, you're limiting yourself to an effective resolution that's only 0.7× or so the physical one,
  - mrob 5y ago
    Bitmap fonts (and hinted fonts are automatically generated bitmap fonts) are pixel art, so the Nyquist limit doesn't apply. In pixel art, the pixels are treated as little squares or rectangles, not band-limited point samples. This means you sacrifice the ability to display arbitrary shapes, but I'm not trying to reproduce printed text so I don't care. I have perfectly sharp text on a 1080p monitor because I disable antialiasing in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf and force full hinting.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Nitpicking, but a pixel is always a point sample, not a little square. The native medium for displaying pixel art is CRT displays, where these point samples are used to control an electron gun that introduces a Gaussian blur, basically the best case for purely analog upsampling (or DAC, rather) of a pixel raster. No little squares in sight, though! What you're talking about is using pixel-perfect control to reach the Nyquist limit, as mentioned in my sibling comment.
      - mrob 5y ago
        Pixel art is defined by treating pixels as little squares. There is no single native medium for displaying pixel art. The same techniques were used for games on portable systems with LCD displays. Additionally, there are many examples of printed art using blocky pixels. The Nyquist limit is irrelevant to pixel art, because the Nyquist limit applies only to reconstructing signals from point samples. Using pixel art on a monochrome LCD (no subpixels), I can display signals with maximum frequency limited only by the sharpness of the edges of the little squares.

jabbany 5y ago

This. The devs and designers are all using 4k, 5k displays these days. Trying to use modern apps etc. on just "FHD" (1080p) displays is painful.

jandrese 5y ago
Over 2/3 of regular users are still using 1080p[1]. If your design looks bad on FHD then it looks bad to most people. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- lmm 5y ago
  Right, but it looks good on the designer's screen. That's the issue.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Just like programmers should have to run their apps on 10 year old computers and feel the pain, so should designers have to try their work on 10 year old monitors.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >Over 2/3 of regular users That isn't going to be the case for Apple users though is it. Apple don't have any non retina devices in their lineup now. The only Apple users who will see a low dpi display are those plugging in a low dpi external monitor. They are going to be a minority.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Perhaps a better survey would be the one by Firefox[0] since it isn't biased towards gamers. Basically HiDPI monitors are like a combined 2% of all Firefox users. 1080p usage is lower than on Steam but that is because 768p usage is higher :-P. [0] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
5y ago