MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-retina displays blurry

Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by sova on Saturday July 07, 2018 @04:18AM (#17477639)

Yeah but isn't it already a solved problem with 1x monitors? Who is implementing things multiple times for no reason? I'm glad in the future it will be easier for Apple because they just won't hire devs to do that part then, but does this imply that 1x monitors will simply look inferior no matter what is done with newer versions of OSX+?

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Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by systoll on Saturday July 07, 2018 @05:58AM (#17477871)

There's a broader change that is an improvement to the abstraction devs work with, which simplifies coding and results in more GPU acceleration.

Essentially, this article: http://darknoon.com/2011/02/07/mac-ui-in-the-age-of-ios/ will be obsolete.

If it's possible to realise those benefits while retaining subpixel antialiasing, it would entail a complete reimplementation.

On the other side of things -- Light-on-dark subpixel antialiasing has always been a little wonky, and Apple disables it in most dark UIs. Without significant changes, dark mode would've been greyscale either way,

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Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by rbanffy on Saturday July 07, 2018 @04:34AM (#17477679)

This complexity is why we can't have windows that spread between 1x and 2x monitors since the introduction of Retina displays.

Ideally everything should be rendered (and cached) to the maximum resolution available (minimum trace widths considered) and then downsampled to the specific screens with subpixel data applied, but that's a lot of processing to do and battery life would suffer.

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Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by brigade on Saturday July 07, 2018 @05:29AM (#17477804)

Eh? Before Yosemite was released in 2014, one window could span between a 1x and 2x monitor. I forget if it was always rendered at 1x, or if it was rendered at 2x and scaled for the 1x, but yeah it looked like crap on one or the other. Actually I think it switched depending on which monitor had more of the window?

But they only eliminated windows spanning across multiple monitors when they made spaces per-display.

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Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by lloeki on Saturday July 07, 2018 @07:12AM (#17478018)

It's still there iirc if you disable separate spaces per display.

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Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by rbanffy on Saturday July 07, 2018 @06:17AM (#17477907)

I don't remember that, but, if you do, I trust your memory (and your hypothesis) over mine.

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Re:MacOS Mojave removes subpixel anti-aliasing, making non-r... by jacobolus on Saturday July 07, 2018 @04:37AM (#17477688)

It’s already a solved problem if you want to keep using the software you already wrote, and never do anything different. (Nobody is stopping people from running OS X 10.13 indefinitely on their 1x displays.)

If you want to rearchitect your whole text / vector graphics rendering pipeline to take proper advantage of GPUs, then you are going to be much happier with your life if you don’t have to double your work to support legacy hardware.

I would love to see Apple implement this kind of thing http://w3.impa.br/~diego/projects/GanEtAl14/

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