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The problem with subpixel antialiasing (the rgba antialiasing), is that it is impossible to do properly with hardware acceleration when you need transparent sur

The problem with subpixel antialiasing (the rgba antialiasing), is that it is impossible to do properly with hardware acceleration when you need transparent surfaces or any rendering with an alpha channel in general. So you need software fallback for those cases, which slows down the rendering pipe eg in web browsers. for 4K screens is easier to just drop subpixel antialiasing and just rely on good old antialiasing instead, since it's no longer needed. I'm thinking most of the complaints with the newer rendering stacks are people still using FHD screen resolutions.

aiilns 4y ago
> most of the complaints with the newer rendering stacks are people still using FHD screen resolutions. I'd bet most people using Linux are using FHD screen resolutions. I'm one of them.
Shadonototra 4y ago
According to steam, the most popular screen resolution is FHD https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
- Macha 4y ago
  The top resolutions: 1080p: 67% 1440p: 10% 768p: 7% 4k: 2.4% 900p: 2.3% Other (includes 5k): 2.3% There's a couple of other resolutions like ultrawide variants get about 1% each called out individually. Since 5k doesn't make the list, we can assume it's at most 1%. So that's 3.3% for 4k and 5k combined. I'll give you that this is a survey of gamers, so I'd expect 1440p to be overrepresented and 5k under-represented compared to say... video editors, but I also think gamers are the larger group of computer users between them. To get an idea of how distorted this is, Mac OS is 2.6% of steam users compared to 6% of global desktop users[1] So if we apply a similar doubling to the retina display share, that's still 6-7% max. Not nearly enough to justify painting 1080p users as irrelevant holdouts. (I would also wager that if you're expanding to "the general public", 768p will gain at a higher rate than retina displays) [1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
SemanticStrengh 4y ago
Whats very unclear is wether 4K make classic antialiasing as good or that subpixel antialiasing would render even better on 4K but they settle on "good enough"?
- iampivot 4y ago
  I think it's not necessarily better, but it's diminishing returns for additional complexity.

aiilns 4y ago

> most of the complaints with the newer rendering stacks are people still using FHD screen resolutions. I'd bet most people using Linux are using FHD screen resolutions. I'm one of them.

Shadonototra 4y ago

According to steam, the most popular screen resolution is FHD https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Macha 4y ago
The top resolutions: 1080p: 67% 1440p: 10% 768p: 7% 4k: 2.4% 900p: 2.3% Other (includes 5k): 2.3% There's a couple of other resolutions like ultrawide variants get about 1% each called out individually. Since 5k doesn't make the list, we can assume it's at most 1%. So that's 3.3% for 4k and 5k combined. I'll give you that this is a survey of gamers, so I'd expect 1440p to be overrepresented and 5k under-represented compared to say... video editors, but I also think gamers are the larger group of computer users between them. To get an idea of how distorted this is, Mac OS is 2.6% of steam users compared to 6% of global desktop users[1] So if we apply a similar doubling to the retina display share, that's still 6-7% max. Not nearly enough to justify painting 1080p users as irrelevant holdouts. (I would also wager that if you're expanding to "the general public", 768p will gain at a higher rate than retina displays) [1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

SemanticStrengh 4y ago

Whats very unclear is wether 4K make classic antialiasing as good or that subpixel antialiasing would render even better on 4K but they settle on "good enough"?

iampivot 4y ago
I think it's not necessarily better, but it's diminishing returns for additional complexity.