4 ms·

I don't have a retina device, so I wonder: are they not capable of rendering normal resolutions? I would have assumed that they simply render a "classic pixel"

by Tichy 14y ago

I don't have a retina device, so I wonder: are they not capable of rendering normal resolutions? I would have assumed that they simply render a "classic pixel" as four retina pixels? So classic web sites should still work?

kevingadd 14y ago
Apple renders a classic pixel as four retina pixels, but they don't apply any filtering, so it makes graphics (particularly text with subpixel antialiasing enabled) look rather awful. If they did filtering it'd look much better, but you can probably imagine the economic incentives not to do that.
- CountSessine 14y ago
  Not economic - runtime performance. The rMBP actually has 5 scaled resolution modes with 2:1 being the 'ideal' 'retina' mode that the laptop defaults to. In 2:1 mode, no filtering is done. Occasionally to get a bit more desktop space I'll shift mine into one of the modes with non-integer scaling to make the desktop bigger, and in those modes filtering is applied. There are two non-integer modes where the scaling is N:1 where N>2 as well. Switch into any of these non-integer scaling modes, though, and screen rendering is slightly but noticeably affected - scrolling windows in particular is much choppier in any of the filtered modes. This is the runtime cost of touching that many pixels in such a large display buffer in order to oversample and filter. As for why 2:1 mode looks so blurry, I'm guessing that its a combination of pixel glow in low resolution displays smoothing edges and comparison to the relative sharpness of the rest of the OSX UI.
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter. Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy. One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"?
    - CountSessine 14y ago
      Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter. Are you seriously advocating that Apple use a desktop GPU in their laptops? Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy. None of this is true. First, the 15" retina mbp has a nvidia GT650M along with an intel gpu. And it's still not enough. Remember that a game running at 2880x1800 using filtering can use memory-bandwidth saving tricks like quincunx which can't be used in a desktop environment. Moreover, in the 'scaled-up' 1920x1200 mode the rMBP supports, the rMBP is essentially super-sampling a much larger pre-display buffer than 2880x1800 Have a read: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/8 http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-w... At the default setting, either Intel’s HD 4000 or NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 650M already have to render and display far more pixels than either GPU was ever intended to. At the 1680 and 1920 settings however the GPUs are doing more work than even their high-end desktop counterparts are used to. In writing this article it finally dawned on me exactly what has been happening at Intel over the past few years. ... To be quite honest, the hardware in the rMBP isn’t enough to deliver a consistently smooth experience across all applications. At 2880 x 1800 most interactions are smooth but things like zooming windows or scrolling on certain web pages is clearly sub-30fps. At the higher scaled resolutions, since the GPU has to render as much as 9.2MP, even UI performance can be sluggish. There’s simply nothing that can be done at this point - Apple is pushing the limits of the hardware we have available today, far beyond what any other OEM has done. Future iterations of the Retina Display MacBook Pro will have faster hardware with embedded DRAM that will help mitigate this problem. But there are other limitations: many elements of screen drawing are still done on the CPU, and as largely serial architectures their ability to scale performance with dramatically higher resolutions is limited. One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"? It has a bigger battery.
nathos 14y ago
"classic" web sites work fine, but bitmapped elements are scaled and end up looking blurry (especially compared to vector elements like text, SVG)
CountSessine 14y ago
They do still work and classic pixels are scaled up to 4 retina pixels. Its just that those blocky 4 retina pixels in scaled-up bitmaps on websites look very bad next to the website's razor-sharp rendered text.

by Tichy 14y ago

kevingadd 14y ago

Apple renders a classic pixel as four retina pixels, but they don't apply any filtering, so it makes graphics (particularly text with subpixel antialiasing enabled) look rather awful. If they did filtering it'd look much better, but you can probably imagine the economic incentives not to do that.

CountSessine 14y ago
Not economic - runtime performance. The rMBP actually has 5 scaled resolution modes with 2:1 being the 'ideal' 'retina' mode that the laptop defaults to. In 2:1 mode, no filtering is done. Occasionally to get a bit more desktop space I'll shift mine into one of the modes with non-integer scaling to make the desktop bigger, and in those modes filtering is applied. There are two non-integer modes where the scaling is N:1 where N>2 as well. Switch into any of these non-integer scaling modes, though, and screen rendering is slightly but noticeably affected - scrolling windows in particular is much choppier in any of the filtered modes. This is the runtime cost of touching that many pixels in such a large display buffer in order to oversample and filter. As for why 2:1 mode looks so blurry, I'm guessing that its a combination of pixel glow in low resolution displays smoothing edges and comparison to the relative sharpness of the rest of the OSX UI.
- kevingadd 14y ago
  Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter. Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy. One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"?
  - CountSessine 14y ago
    Runtime performance is exactly what I'm referring to by economic incentives. Any adequate desktop (or even mobile) GPU made in the last few years has the bandwidth to spare to do bilinear filtering (if not bicubic or better) when upscaling a framebuffer to fit a display; you won't see modern video games ship with filtering turned off because literally every decent piece of hardware has the bandwidth and cycles to spare to filter. Are you seriously advocating that Apple use a desktop GPU in their laptops? Unfortunately, Apple puts tremendously underpowered Intel GPUs into their Retina macbooks - GPUs that struggle to drive even low-DPI displays or run games at native resolution - and then expects them to drive displays containing 4x the pixels. It's no wonder that scrolling performance is choppy. None of this is true. First, the 15" retina mbp has a nvidia GT650M along with an intel gpu. And it's still not enough. Remember that a game running at 2880x1800 using filtering can use memory-bandwidth saving tricks like quincunx which can't be used in a desktop environment. Moreover, in the 'scaled-up' 1920x1200 mode the rMBP supports, the rMBP is essentially super-sampling a much larger pre-display buffer than 2880x1800 Have a read: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/8 http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-w... At the default setting, either Intel’s HD 4000 or NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 650M already have to render and display far more pixels than either GPU was ever intended to. At the 1680 and 1920 settings however the GPUs are doing more work than even their high-end desktop counterparts are used to. In writing this article it finally dawned on me exactly what has been happening at Intel over the past few years. ... To be quite honest, the hardware in the rMBP isn’t enough to deliver a consistently smooth experience across all applications. At 2880 x 1800 most interactions are smooth but things like zooming windows or scrolling on certain web pages is clearly sub-30fps. At the higher scaled resolutions, since the GPU has to render as much as 9.2MP, even UI performance can be sluggish. There’s simply nothing that can be done at this point - Apple is pushing the limits of the hardware we have available today, far beyond what any other OEM has done. Future iterations of the Retina Display MacBook Pro will have faster hardware with embedded DRAM that will help mitigate this problem. But there are other limitations: many elements of screen drawing are still done on the CPU, and as largely serial architectures their ability to scale performance with dramatically higher resolutions is limited. One could argue that the choice of terrible Intel GPUs is actually to improve battery life, not to save money; that might be true. But in that case, why not include their (rather well implemented) GPU-switching technology in all Retina macbooks? Why only the 15"? It has a bigger battery.

nathos 14y ago

"classic" web sites work fine, but bitmapped elements are scaled and end up looking blurry (especially compared to vector elements like text, SVG)

CountSessine 14y ago

They do still work and classic pixels are scaled up to 4 retina pixels. Its just that those blocky 4 retina pixels in scaled-up bitmaps on websites look very bad next to the website's razor-sharp rendered text.