Comment by Nevermark
5 days ago
Pixel density continues to rise, but Microsoft might be engaged in… premature de-optimization?
It’s duals/mirrors all the way down. Or up.
5 days ago
Pixel density continues to rise, but Microsoft might be engaged in… premature de-optimization?
It’s duals/mirrors all the way down. Or up.
But the angular resolution of the eye doesn't rise. For a desktop monitor 100 ppi practically already reached the limits. Anything beyond that is just additional burden for the GPU and a waste of bandwidth. Surely you can increase resolution just to make font rendering easier, but you also have to pay the price in energy consumption or speed - without any visible improvement.
At the traditional 96 dpi, you have to be 3 ft away to exceed the retinal density. Personally, I sit at half that distance. Something around 200 would be more ideal. Laptops you might sit even closer.
Mobile devices, unless you get really close to the screen, have matched the retinal density for a while. Most people hold the device at about 8 inches, so 450 dpi is the value to hit.
Edit These measurements assume 20:20 vision, which is the average. Many people exceed that. So you'd need slightly higher values if you're feeling pedantic.
Having the focal point up close for a long time isn't that good for the eyes, so sitting closer than an arms length to a desk monitor isn't an idea that lasts well.
100 dpi with subpixel rendering already maxes out angular resolution (horizontal). It doesn't max out everything (retinal), so you still see some artifacts, but practically this is not that relevant. The price in energy/bandwidth rises quadratic for very little gain.
To get the equivalent of 4K at 100 ppi - with 200 ppi you have to put the burden of 8K onto the GPU... For now this is absolutely not good - High ppi is ok for small monitors and handheld devices, but for a decent desk with several good monitors GPUs just aren't ready yet.
The difference between my 27" 4k and 1440p screens is still quite obvious and I don't consider myself particularly sensitive to these things.
For rendering of text/video even an underpowered integrated gpu can handle it fine, only issue is using a bunch more ram.
For reference my very underpowered desktop AMD igpu on 3 generations old gpu architecture (2CUs of RDNA 2) only has trouble with the occasional overly heavy browser animation
A few years ago, I replaced my 24" 1080p monitors (~96 ppi) with 27" 4k monitors (~157 ppi), and the increased pixel density was very noticeable, and I'd probably notice an increase over that. I sit about 3 feet away from them.
300 ppi matches printed books which looks nice. On notebook computers having a 3840x2160 panel might not be worth the reduced battery life.