Comment by LoganDark
5 days ago
I hate subpixel rendering. It's impossible to turn it off for displays that don't need it. It looks absolutely awful. I wish it was never invented.
5 days ago
I hate subpixel rendering. It's impossible to turn it off for displays that don't need it. It looks absolutely awful. I wish it was never invented.
Hate seems a bit strong for an increase in perceived horizontal resolution on low DPI displays, but to each their own. That said, I'm not sure what you mean by it being impossible to turn off. On Windows you can just disable ClearType per monitor, and on Linux it's configurable either through your DE, fontconfig, or sometimes at the application level.
MacOS went the other direction and removed subpixel rendering entirely, which is partly why low DPI external displays tend to look worse there.
> That said, I'm not sure what you mean by it being impossible to turn off.
You can try to configure it to be off, and while that almost works, many applications will still simply not respect the setting. This is particularly apparent (and infuriating) with apps that don't render in high-resolution mode, because their rendering then no longer has anything to do with actual subpixels.
I imagine this behavior came from ClearType having been a special case, and therefore non-native widget toolkits getting explicitly programmed to render with it on Windows, forgetting that the user should be able to turn it off!!
> MacOS went the other direction and removed subpixel rendering entirely, which is partly why low DPI external displays tend to look worse there.
Subpixel antialiasing is a compromise. Once every Mac shipped with a Retina display, there was no need to retain that compromise, because you already get high resolution so you may as well get color accuracy too.
I will note macOS still enables by default a feature called "stem darkening" (incorrectly called "font smoothing" in macOS Settings) that also looks fairly awful to my eye, and seems itself a legacy from the low-DPI days.
> I imagine this behavior came from ClearType having been a special case, and therefore non-native widget toolkits getting explicitly programmed to render with it on Windows, forgetting that the user should be able to turn it off!!
I see, that is indeed frustrating.
> Once every Mac shipped with a Retina display, there was no need to retain that compromise, because you already get high resolution so you may as well get color accuracy too.
I believe that is Apple's position, and it may be valid for their own high-DPI displays. However, it overlooks the fact that most external monitors, especially typical office displays, are still far from retina pixel densities. Even on a relatively good 27" 4K panel, text on macOS looks noticably worse than on Windows or Linux. Then again, that's likely compounded by the lack of fractional scaling. Unless you're using a 5-6K external display, you aren't hitting 250+ PPI to get crisp text at all.
> I will note macOS still enables by default a feature called "stem darkening" (incorrectly called "font smoothing" in macOS Settings) that also looks fairly awful to my eye, and seems itself a legacy from the low-DPI days.
Yea, I've seen quite the range of stem darkening implementations. Skipping proper gamma-correct blending in many doesn't help.
The really annoying thing nowadays is renderers attempting to apply subpixel rendering to panels that aren't even RGB/BGR in the first place.
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