Composiors are generally switching to being gpu accelerated, not to mention apps will do their own gpu accelerated UIs just because the OS ui systems are all junk at the moment

We are at the perfect moment to re-embrace software rasterizers because CPU manufacturers are starting to add HBM and v-cache.

An 8K 32bpp framebuffer is ... omg 126MB for a single copy. I was going to argue that a software rasterizer running on vcache would be doable, but not for 8k.

For 4k, with 32MB per display buffer, it could be possible but heavy compositing will require going out to main memory. 1440p would be even better at only 15MB per display buffer.

For 1440p at 144Hz and 2TB/s (vcache max), best case is an overdraw of 984 frames/frame

Does 4k matter?

I was doing a11y work for an application a few months back and got interested into the question of desktop screen sizes. I see all these ads for 4k and bigger monitors but they don't show up here

https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...

And on the steam hardware survey I am seeing a little more than 5% with a big screen.

Myself I am swimming in old monitors and TV to the point where I am going to start putting Pepper's ghost machines in my windows. I think I want to buy a new TV, but I get a free old TV. I pick up monitors that are in the hallway and people are tripping on them and I take them home. Hypothetically I want a state-of-the-art monitor with HDR and wide gamut and all that but the way things are going I might never buy a TV or monitor again.

All the browsers on my machine report my resolution as 1080p despite using 4k. I assume this is because I run at 200% scaling (I believe this is relatively common among anyone using a 4k resolution)

If the above-linked website uses data reported by the browser, I wonder how this scenario might be taken into consideration (or even if such a thing is possible)

A pixel is defined as 1/96th of an inch in the web world so it is dependent on your dpi/scaling. There is a window.devicePixelRatio that JavaScript can use to get actual pixels.

Remember the days when you would be in danger of your apartment being burglarized and thieves would take your TV or receiver or CD player etc.? Nowadays that's called junk removal and you pay for it! How times have changed...

Curious to hear more about the a11y work.

Run of the mill.

A complex desktop web form with several pages, lots of combo boxes, repeating fields, etc. I cleaned up the WCAG AA issues and even the S, but the AAA requirement for click targets was out of scope but had me thinking that I wanted to make labels (say on a dropdown menu bar) as big as I reasonably could and that in turn got me thinking about how much space I had to work with on different resolution screens so I looked up those stats and tried to see what would fit in which constraints.

> Does 4k matter?

The PC I'm typing this on has two 27in 4k screens. I'm sitting so that I look at them from about 75cm away (that's 2.5 feet in weird units).

I archive most of my video files in 720p, because I genuinely don't see that big of a difference between even 720p and 1080p. It is definitely visible, but usually, it does not add much to the experience, considering that most videos today are produced to be watchable on smartphones and tablets just as much as cinema screens or huge TVs. I only make an exception here for "cinematic" content that was intended for the very big screen. That does not necessarily mean movies, but also certain YouTube videos, like "Timelapse of the Future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA - This one hits differently for me in 4K vs. just 1080p. Having to watch this in just 720p would be tragic, because its cinematography relies on 4K's ability to resolve very fine lines.

So why would I make a point to have both my screens be 4K? Because where else do you look at fine lines a lot? You're looking at it right now: Text. For any occupation that requires reading a lot of text (like programming!), 4K absolutely makes a difference. Even if I don't decrease the font size to get more text on screen at once, just having the outlines of the glyphs be sharper reduces eye strain in my experience.

A unit based on the average size of the human foot is not "weird".

Correct. It is insane. Bonkers. Absurd. How the hell can you live with that-stupid.

No. It is in fact completely normal and has been repeated many times in human history. A unit based on an arbitrary fraction of the distance from the north pole to the equator is quite a bit more odd when you think about it.

And by "are generally switching" you're really trying to say "generally switched a decade ago".

'cept for Linux.

GNOME 3 had a hardware accelerated compositor on release in 2011.

Ubuntu came with Compiz by default in 2007: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/11/ubunt...

“Ubuntu 7.10 is the first version of Ubuntu that ships with Compiz Fusion enabled by default on supported hardware. Compiz Fusion, which combines Compiz with certain components developed by the Beryl community, is a compositing window manager that adds a wide range of visual effects to Ubuntu's desktop environment. The default settings for Compiz enable basic effects—like window shadows and fading menus—that are subtle and unobtrusive. For more elaborate Compiz features, like wobbling windows, users can select the Extra option on the Visual Effects tab of the Appearance Preferences dialog.”

I remember Beryl, those were fun times.

Different desktop but KDE still has the wobbly windows as an option, I enabled them out of nostalgia recently.

Yeah, I worked on that but I didn't think that would count since it was a distro, not a desktop environment. In that case Novell shipped compiz in 2006 so even earlier.

macOS had one in 2000. Windows shortly thereafter.

What?

MacOS in 2000 was still old MacOS, with no compositing at all. The NeXT derived version of MacOS was still in beta, and I tried it back then, it was very rough. Even once OSX shipped in 2001, it was still software composited. Quartz Extreme implemented GPU compositing in 10.2, which shipped in 2002.

Windows finally got a composited desktop in Vista, released in 2007. It was GPU accelerated from day one.

> What does an OS need a GPU for?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

The modern paradigm of "application blasts out a rectangle of pixels" and "the desktop manager composes those into another rectangle of pixels and blasts them out to the screen".

It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM your GFX device driver was the only software that could use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another "processor" in your computer that can read and write to RAM and the application can use the GPU in user space any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same (in user space) and in the end all the OS is managing communication with the GPU.

For that approach to work you need to have enough fill rate that you can redraw the screen several times per frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford some visual bling, but Intel didn't give to them.

If I recall correctly, Vista was hard depending on DirectX 9a for Aero. Intel GPU parts embedded in mobile CPUs were almost, but not fully DX 9a capable, but Intel convinced Microsoft to accept it as "compatible". That created lots of problems to everyone.

IIRC they also implemented some features by reporting them as available and mostly emulating them on the CPU to qualify.

There's a fancy terminal emulator written in Rust that uses GPU acceleration. I mean, it is emulating a needlepoint printer...

The GUI >99% of users used to interface with the OS required a GPU to composite the different 2d buffers with fancy effects. IIRC if you knew how do disable as much as possible of it the performance without GPU acceleration was not great, but acceptable. It really sucked when you had an already slow system and the GPU pretended to support the required APIs, but the implementation didn't satisfy the implied performance expectation e.g. pretending to support a feature in as "hardware accelerated", but implementing it mostly on the CPU inside the GPU driver, but even the things the old Intel GPUs really did in hardware were often a lot slower than a "real" GPU of the time. Also CPU and iGPU constantly fought over the often very limited memory bandwidth.

> My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU.

Which is far more powerful than the ones that caused problems almost two decades ago.

More than you think.

As people noted, most of your GUI is being rendered by it. Every video you watch is accelerated by it, and if it has some compute support, some applications are using it for faster math at the background (mostly image editors, but who knows).

Integrated Intel GPU's have come a long way since Windows Vista. They started to be usable around 2012 and actually decent in the current decade