5 ms·

Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously

by dkarl 5y ago

Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pro right now, and the difference in how well the text renders on the two displays is plain. I guess as soon as Apple started making laptops with 300dpi screens, it became okay to render fuzzy text on any screen that wasn't 300dpi.

jassmith87 5y ago
The problem is you have it plugged into a macbook. Apple doesn't support subpixel anti-aliasing in any of its latest releases. Your monitor looks so fuzzy because Apple has removed the capability to make it not look so fuzzy.
- js2 5y ago
  Context: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-removes-subpixel-anti-aliasing/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-remove...
- p1necone 5y ago
  This is only part of the reason. The other reason is that Apple doesn't actually do fractional UI scaling, they only ever render into a framebuffer at whole integer multiples of an internal "native" resolution and then scale down this framebuffer to the actual monitor resolution afaik (they still render natively to this multiplied resolution - no doubled pixels or anything like that). This results in less crisp output than you would get if you actually rendered vector based UI at the exact monitor resolution or if you natively rendered bitmap art 1:1 with the monitor resolution. This approach makes sense when you're only using Apples monitors because they can optimize their internal "native" resolutions for the handful of actual native resolutions they offer, but it falls apart when you start plugging in external third party lower dpi monitors. (I believe this is also the same approach that Gnome 3 uses to do (experimental, with a toggle) non integer multiple UI scaling.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- abhaynayar 5y ago
  Oh interesting, I was wondering why my HP (Ubuntu) laptop looked sharper than my Macbook on a QHD monitor.
jefftk 5y ago
> I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. Some programs let you use pixel-perfect fonts, even today. For example, in iterm2 I do "Profiles > Text > Monaco Regular 10pt non-antialiased"
dmonitor 5y ago
You can turn off ClearType to get rid of the aliasing in fonts on Windows
tomc1985 5y ago
Text fuzziness has had nothing to do with your monitor ever since we've gone digital with HDMI and DVI Linux & Windows generally use implementations of antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract away the details for you
- necovek 5y ago
  It can still happen when different display panel pixel colour arrangements don't match subpixel rendering settings in software, though that'll usually happen with non-monitor displays like TVs.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    True, though in practice I haven't noticed it to be nearly as obnoxious as Apple stuff trying to upscale at non-integer intervals
    - necovek 5y ago
      Yeah, I was completely surprised when I moved from Ubuntu 20.04 to MacBook Pro 14 on the very same Dell U3219Q: MacOS made text editing completely unpleasant. Then I upgraded my son's laptop to Ubuntu 22.04 RC, and I was greeted with the same fuzziness. I hope that's only due to Wayland, I haven't tried out the X desktop when docked.
    - wiredfool 5y ago
      I'm using the U3219Q at 1:1 resolution (so 3800px wide) on BigSur and Monterey, and some display text is sharp at the beginning and end of the text block, but fuzzy in the middle. It's like there's an aliasing going on, where a text block that would be natively 100 px wide is shown at 99px or 100px. It was better on previous versions, I think Mojave was the last good one.
necovek 5y ago
I've recently gotten a MacBook Pro 14 for work, and tried out Ubuntu 22.04 RC on a laptop, and I was confounded with how fuzzy both of them look today (Ubuntu with fractional scaling, but Mac even with 2x scaling on 4k screen). Whatever setup was there on Ubuntu 20.04 which made text render clearly needs to come back (I used to use slight hinting setting, but it seems subpixel rendering is going away on Linux too). Please!
- saltminer 5y ago
  That's probably because Ubuntu 21.04 used Wayland by default for all but Nvidia [0] and 22.04 enabled it for Nvidia [1], and Wayland's fractional scaling is an ugly hack (both in how it's implemented and how it looks) [2][3]. Progress is being made [4], but it's quite slow. Switch to the X session on the login screen and you should have good scaling again (also, lots of applications that do screen sharing, like Zoom, do not work on Wayland [5]). Or just be like me and use Mint, which has no plans for Wayland support and you don't have to think about any of this. [0]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wayland-by-default https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wa... [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-22.04-NV-Wayland-Default https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractional_scaling_may_be_sort_of_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractio... [3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/34 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... [4]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... [5]: https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharing-broken-with-GNOME-41-on-Fedora-35/m-p/22539 https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharin...
  - necovek 5y ago
    Thanks, good to know it's only due to Wayland, and that it's both being worked on there, and that there is a quick fix otherwise when I upgrade to 22.04.
necovek 5y ago
To mitigate the issues you mention, I've long wanted higher res screens since forever (I had one of those early Vaio VGN-Z that was the only 13-14" laptop with 1600x900 displays when 1366x768 dominated; they were also the first to move to 1920x1080 with their next model). And I had that Dell's first 24" 4K screen that required DP MST to go past 30Hz. I've tried disabling subpixel rendering to see if that resolution was really sufficient (185dpi) but you could then see text regain jagged edges. Thus I reasoned that, with my glasses correcting my myopia to better than 20/20, I needed to wait a while until I can fully enjoy nice, laser-printout-like text. As a reminder, even laser printers printing at 600dpi use techniques similar to subpixel rendering to render that smooth text. I am hoping for some 8K screens at 32" for productivity work (though that's still probably too low at 275 dpi), and I never get it why people keep talking about there not being any 8K content. My desktop is my 8K content, though I also lack the GPU to drive it at more than 30Hz :)
- mr_toad 5y ago
  You’ll also need HDMI 2.1 compatible gear if you want 8k at 60Hz, and there are caveats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Refresh_frequency_limits_for_standard_video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Refresh_frequency_limits_...
  - necovek 5y ago
    Yeah, thus my mention of lacking a modern-enough GPU to drive them. Thanks for a very clear and direct source for the bandwidth, I was under the impression HDMI 2.1 would not require DSC for 8k at 60Hz but never paid attention to the actual numbers. DP 2.0 is what I need to wait for then :) What was the bandwidth it promises? 77Gbps, should work. Then again, I feel like eGPUs are the way forward for this, as you can keep the GPU close to the screen, and your computer would talk a "semantically compressed" (or rather terser) language to the display output (eg. talk OpenGL to your display).
murermader 5y ago
This has nothing to do with the display, this is a MacOS scaling issue. Plug in a Windows device, put it at 100% scaling and it will be as sharp as it can get. macOS is really limited when in comes to displays, because the display must have a PPI of around 110, or a multiple of that. It sucks how bad macOS is at scaling, especially with the terrible font rendering.
rsanek 5y ago
I think the secret is to go with much larger monitors and blow up the text size. Right now I'm typing this on a M1 MBP plugged into a curved 48" 4K TV that I use as a monitor. I can have the text scaled about 3-4x as large (physically) as on my Macbook and it looks great. Slight bonus, avoiding reading small text is healthier for your long-term vision.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by dkarl 5y ago

jassmith87 5y ago

The problem is you have it plugged into a macbook. Apple doesn't support subpixel anti-aliasing in any of its latest releases. Your monitor looks so fuzzy because Apple has removed the capability to make it not look so fuzzy.

js2 5y ago
Context: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-removes-subpixel-anti-aliasing/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-remove...
p1necone 5y ago
This is only part of the reason. The other reason is that Apple doesn't actually do fractional UI scaling, they only ever render into a framebuffer at whole integer multiples of an internal "native" resolution and then scale down this framebuffer to the actual monitor resolution afaik (they still render natively to this multiplied resolution - no doubled pixels or anything like that). This results in less crisp output than you would get if you actually rendered vector based UI at the exact monitor resolution or if you natively rendered bitmap art 1:1 with the monitor resolution. This approach makes sense when you're only using Apples monitors because they can optimize their internal "native" resolutions for the handful of actual native resolutions they offer, but it falls apart when you start plugging in external third party lower dpi monitors. (I believe this is also the same approach that Gnome 3 uses to do (experimental, with a toggle) non integer multiple UI scaling.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
abhaynayar 5y ago
Oh interesting, I was wondering why my HP (Ubuntu) laptop looked sharper than my Macbook on a QHD monitor.

jefftk 5y ago

> I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. Some programs let you use pixel-perfect fonts, even today. For example, in iterm2 I do "Profiles > Text > Monaco Regular 10pt non-antialiased"

dmonitor 5y ago

You can turn off ClearType to get rid of the aliasing in fonts on Windows

tomc1985 5y ago

Text fuzziness has had nothing to do with your monitor ever since we've gone digital with HDMI and DVI Linux & Windows generally use implementations of antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract away the details for you

necovek 5y ago
It can still happen when different display panel pixel colour arrangements don't match subpixel rendering settings in software, though that'll usually happen with non-monitor displays like TVs.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  True, though in practice I haven't noticed it to be nearly as obnoxious as Apple stuff trying to upscale at non-integer intervals
  - necovek 5y ago
    Yeah, I was completely surprised when I moved from Ubuntu 20.04 to MacBook Pro 14 on the very same Dell U3219Q: MacOS made text editing completely unpleasant. Then I upgraded my son's laptop to Ubuntu 22.04 RC, and I was greeted with the same fuzziness. I hope that's only due to Wayland, I haven't tried out the X desktop when docked.
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    I'm using the U3219Q at 1:1 resolution (so 3800px wide) on BigSur and Monterey, and some display text is sharp at the beginning and end of the text block, but fuzzy in the middle. It's like there's an aliasing going on, where a text block that would be natively 100 px wide is shown at 99px or 100px. It was better on previous versions, I think Mojave was the last good one.

necovek 5y ago

I've recently gotten a MacBook Pro 14 for work, and tried out Ubuntu 22.04 RC on a laptop, and I was confounded with how fuzzy both of them look today (Ubuntu with fractional scaling, but Mac even with 2x scaling on 4k screen). Whatever setup was there on Ubuntu 20.04 which made text render clearly needs to come back (I used to use slight hinting setting, but it seems subpixel rendering is going away on Linux too). Please!

saltminer 5y ago
That's probably because Ubuntu 21.04 used Wayland by default for all but Nvidia [0] and 22.04 enabled it for Nvidia [1], and Wayland's fractional scaling is an ugly hack (both in how it's implemented and how it looks) [2][3]. Progress is being made [4], but it's quite slow. Switch to the X session on the login screen and you should have good scaling again (also, lots of applications that do screen sharing, like Zoom, do not work on Wayland [5]). Or just be like me and use Mint, which has no plans for Wayland support and you don't have to think about any of this. [0]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wayland-by-default https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-will-use-wa... [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-22.04-NV-Wayland-Default https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractional_scaling_may_be_sort_of_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractio... [3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/34 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... [4]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... [5]: https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharing-broken-with-GNOME-41-on-Fedora-35/m-p/22539 https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharin...
- necovek 5y ago
  Thanks, good to know it's only due to Wayland, and that it's both being worked on there, and that there is a quick fix otherwise when I upgrade to 22.04.

necovek 5y ago

To mitigate the issues you mention, I've long wanted higher res screens since forever (I had one of those early Vaio VGN-Z that was the only 13-14" laptop with 1600x900 displays when 1366x768 dominated; they were also the first to move to 1920x1080 with their next model). And I had that Dell's first 24" 4K screen that required DP MST to go past 30Hz. I've tried disabling subpixel rendering to see if that resolution was really sufficient (185dpi) but you could then see text regain jagged edges. Thus I reasoned that, with my glasses correcting my myopia to better than 20/20, I needed to wait a while until I can fully enjoy nice, laser-printout-like text. As a reminder, even laser printers printing at 600dpi use techniques similar to subpixel rendering to render that smooth text. I am hoping for some 8K screens at 32" for productivity work (though that's still probably too low at 275 dpi), and I never get it why people keep talking about there not being any 8K content. My desktop is my 8K content, though I also lack the GPU to drive it at more than 30Hz :)

mr_toad 5y ago
You’ll also need HDMI 2.1 compatible gear if you want 8k at 60Hz, and there are caveats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Refresh_frequency_limits_for_standard_video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Refresh_frequency_limits_...
- necovek 5y ago
  Yeah, thus my mention of lacking a modern-enough GPU to drive them. Thanks for a very clear and direct source for the bandwidth, I was under the impression HDMI 2.1 would not require DSC for 8k at 60Hz but never paid attention to the actual numbers. DP 2.0 is what I need to wait for then :) What was the bandwidth it promises? 77Gbps, should work. Then again, I feel like eGPUs are the way forward for this, as you can keep the GPU close to the screen, and your computer would talk a "semantically compressed" (or rather terser) language to the display output (eg. talk OpenGL to your display).

murermader 5y ago

This has nothing to do with the display, this is a MacOS scaling issue. Plug in a Windows device, put it at 100% scaling and it will be as sharp as it can get. macOS is really limited when in comes to displays, because the display must have a PPI of around 110, or a multiple of that. It sucks how bad macOS is at scaling, especially with the terrible font rendering.

rsanek 5y ago

I think the secret is to go with much larger monitors and blow up the text size. Right now I'm typing this on a M1 MBP plugged into a curved 48" 4K TV that I use as a monitor. I can have the text scaled about 3-4x as large (physically) as on my Macbook and it looks great. Slight bonus, avoiding reading small text is healthier for your long-term vision.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]