4 ms·

Why is support limited at all? I would have thought that displaying up to N pixels - where N is much higher than the number of pixels in an 8K display - would

• seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  My guess is that the OS assets would have to be redone after that. We are still stuck using pixel art for lots of things, and it is nice to have some standards until vector is good enough for everything.
  • tormeh 12y ago
    Why isn't vector good enough?
    • maccard 12y ago
      Because you still have to rasterise it, which is a relatively slow operation, and considering rendering the OS assets is one of the most common tasks you will perform, it probably needs to be a very fast routine
      • tehmaco 12y ago
        Would it not be more efficient to produce the correctly scaled bitmaps once, then cache the output?
        • tormeh 12y ago
          Yeah, just render it on resolution change.
          • bitL 12y ago
            It's not that simple. Normally you render significantly upscaled stuff in an off-screen buffer and then downscale it for the best possible appearance for every single frame. There are some ratios you need to keep, or you'd end up with Linux-style graphics "quality" (try scaling factor other than 1.0). If you just scale icon/bitmap once without thinking about this, it would look most likely ugly after upscaling/downscaling steps (unless you got lucky).
            • vidarh 12y ago
              That's mainly an issue at low resolutions.
              • bitL 12y ago
                It's like when you learn how to notice aliasing artifacts in photos taken with DSLRs. It cannot be unseen. So even if those issues are mostly noticeable in low-res, you "cannot unsee" them in higher resolutions anymore either.
      • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        The bigger problem is decent renderings at lower resolution. My wife did a lot of red lining for low-end Nokia phones. Even at the higher end, you still need to carefully produce bitmaps (make in Illustrator, red line the bits in PhotoShop). Now, this becomes easier at higher resolutions, but you still need to do it, I think (fonts are all hinted to avoid artifacts, some basic shapes are fine, but do anything complicated and you'll begin to notice jaggies that you can eliminate with a hand tuned bitmap...).
    • georgemcbay 12y ago
      Vectors are not a panacea. http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-icons.html http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-... (Among other articles about this topic). Having said that, I still wish they were better supported in modern OSes as a hybrid solution because while they start to fall apart at small sizes they do handle the scaling in the other direction (which is what this topic is mostly about here anyway) well, certainly better than just upsampling a bitmap icon.
• madeofpalk 12y ago
  I think this is more for 8k displays that scale down to sub-8k resolutions. Basically supporting higher DPI devices.
• okasaki 12y ago
  I guess it's for similar reasons that different Windows editions support different amounts of memory and CPUs and XP didn't get DirectX 10 They limit features so there's reason to buy new versions.
• higherpurpose 12y ago
  Probably because Windows already has the worst resolution scaling system of all operating systems, and developers basically have to support every single resolution that would appear in hardware. So they try to limit the resolutions to make it somewhat more manageable (even if it still remains the OS with the worst resolution scaling system).