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Apple Including Ultra High Resolution Artwork in Lion for Possible Retina Displays?
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All very nice and I'm fully supportive of more high resolution graphics as soon as possible. It's a shame they don't believe in supporting the millions of Blu-ray discs being sold though, and trying to convince people that 720p iTunes content is good enough for TVs that are bigger than any of the displays they've ever sold, whilst planning for smaller but higher resolution screens that they must apparently believe makes a difference.
No one is saying photos should be changed to vector based art. Looking at my dock right now, nothing is a photo, it's all cartoony images that when converted to vector art (something again, KDE did 10 years ago) isn't much bigger than JPEGs or PNGs when saved as SVG.
Also, another big plus, SVG being text based XML compresses very, very well (don't forget JPEG and PNG are compressed formats). For icons, it made sense to move to SVG 10 years ago. Apple is late to the game in this regard.
For wallpapers, some make sense (more cartoony images or things like the aurora wallpapers of past OS X releases) and some don't. I'm not arguing Apple drop support for pixel based formats, but rather that they add support for vector based art and use it as much as possible where it makes sense.
If a few unpaid Linux hackers can make it work, why can't Apple ?
In this case, last generation cards like the AMD Radeon 6000 that are about to show up in Macs (finally!) are quite capable of outputting the 3200x2000 resolutions which are being talked about here with the mount Fuji background. They have the RAM, the output bandwidth and the processing power.
Resolution is a function of both pixel count and screen size. While there were less pixels on the iPhone screen, it had "higher resolution" in the form of higher DPI
Depends on who you talk too. OS X presents resolution as just the vertical and horizontal pixel counts, without mention of the PPI. For example, looking at System Preferences > Displays will show resolutions in this format, w/o mention of display size and PPI. The iPhone 4 tech specs seems to do the same thing, where resolution is linked to the pixel count and the PPI is mentioned afterwords.
However, other times, I've seen it resolution (in a computer context) linked to PPI as well. Its just depends on who your are talking to.
I know, the old 720p is good enough marketing speak does make you laugh really.
I have wondered, when they finally decide they can supply 1080p downloads from iTunes and they come up with a new marketing line to support this change, perhaps in another year or 3. Will they offer free downloads of the 1080p versions to those customers who have bought 720p versions of the films?
Surely they won't expect people to pay a second time, as often they are paying as much for the iTunes version as the bluray physical disk 1080p version.
They use a lot more CPU time to process though. A JPG can be quickly converted to a bitmap and sent off to the GPU, a vector image has to be rendered before conversion to bitmap. Just imagine moving your mouse over the Dock with magnification on, each icon would need to be re-rendered for every time the mouse moved one pixel. With bitmaps, it's all done by the GPU. When there're hundreds of icons on display at once, that will probably become quite CPU intensive. I'm not surprised KDE supported it, it's open source, and we all know Linux is the king of feature creep.
You said yourself that wallpapers should be vector graphics. And by that, I presumed you meant the background in the subject of the thread. Safari supports SVG, but imo, it's not really a big thing that there's no support for it as a wallpaper. It's not the first thing people think of when they list Snow Leopard's shortcomings
The GPU in the iPad 2 is powerful, but let's not go crazy here, it can't drive an x2 display and still get the same framerates. Heck, even on a PS3 most games don't really run at full 1080p because the graphics chip can't handle all the pixels.
On a mac though, it is different. The GPU is more than capable.
That's not Resolution Independence. Resolution Independence is a completely Vector based Drawing Model that post renders to bitmaps based upon the PPI of the screen and the resolution set by the operating system. Every object on the screen is a vector and when scaled up and down will lose no resolution. The buffers for rendering offloaded to the streams/cores of the GPU(GPUs) need to have enough performance to show it is seamless to the naked eye before it's released. That requires OpenGL 3.x/4.x across the entire System with OpenCL 1.1 optimized throughout the OS.
Again, KDE 2.0, 10 years ago. My Pentium 2 333 mhz didn't break a sweat doing SVG icons then (the Krystal SVG icon theme).
I seriously doubt this is even an issue.
You said yourself that wallpapers should be vector graphics. And by that, I presumed you meant the background in the subject of the thread. Safari supports SVG, but imo, it's not really a big thing that there's no support for it as a wallpaper. It's not the first thing people think of when they list Snow Leopard's shortcomings
Sure it's not, but why bother making bigger and bigger pixel images when implementing vector art both has precedent (Gnome, KDE, all the Linux WMs or almost all of them) and is superior for this application.
For images that can't be easily converted, I'm with you. But I don't understand the resistance to SVG support, which would be a decade late. Sure it's not a shortcoming, but in light of these stories, it would be a "nicer to have".
Having extra resolution would probably look awesome on the GUI, but I'm afraid everything else is going to look like crap.
The graphics used on websites, for example, would become a pixel counting fest. Unless the entire web updates their graphics, of course. But that would mean slow loading times. Imagine all the smileys used on this forum would have a resolution of 512x512 pixels, or more. Yikes!
The graphics used on websites, for example, would become a pixel counting fest. Unless the entire web updates their graphics, of course. But that would mean slow loading times. Imagine all the smileys used on this forum would have a resolution of 512x512 pixels, or more. Yikes!
No one is doubling pixel counts on screens anytime soon. Don't worry. A lot of people misunderstand "Retina" displays.
This is probably ahead of upcoming monitors that utilize all the bandwidth of DP 1.2, some monitors with 3480 horizontal resolution. Think of it like the ACD 30", only more pixels. No one had to "re-do all the graphics on the web" for 2560x1600, they won't for this either.
It'll just look smaller on your screen. Apple is just prepping wallpapers for these monitors and making sure icons blow-up non-pixelated at maximum dock zooming.
It's probably a brain tumor due to the RF energy, not at all related to the screen resolution. Nothing to worry about.
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This is really nice. But is it really necessary? How many ppi will it be?
This is really nice. But is it really necessary? How many ppi will it be?
Again, KDE 2.0, 10 years ago. My Pentium 2 333 mhz didn't break a sweat doing SVG icons then (the Krystal SVG icon theme).
I seriously doubt this is even an issue.
I doubt it had to process translucency or resize 50 times per second for 30+ images though
If it were as efficient as bitmaps, it'd be used for game textures for sure... A texture would scale to any size with no pixellation at all, and the details wouldn't get blurred out when scaling down.I do agree SVG support is a good thing, just I don't see it getting used much. Even with resolution independence, standard pixel images are much easier to handle.
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3200x2000 is only a little higher than what the current 27" boasts.
Also, it would depend on the viewing distance to be able to call it a retina display. Heck, a 1080p TV from 10 feet away is a retina display.
3200x2000 is only a little higher than what the current 27" boasts.
Also, it would depend on the viewing distance to be able to call it a retina display. Heck, a 1080p TV from 10 feet away is a retina display.
Win... I'm confused on your response. (XY resolution)/(Screen size) = your PPI.
Most laptops fall between 110-140ppi. Of course, the iPhone Retina display is above 300ppi.
BTW... not sure why the original poster stated "DPI"... that is for print only. Maybe a mistake?
I dont think the world is ready for such massive resolutions. How long will it take for games to take advantage of them, and for the graphics cards that Apple sell to handle it.
I hate seeing things not at the native display resolution, it looks worse than having the graphics waaaay down to support the reso.
I hate seeing things not at the native display resolution, it looks worse than having the graphics waaaay down to support the reso.
The current iMac's can't even run games at 2560x1440 very well, so an even higher resolution? Unless they want to stick a desktop Radeon 6950 (at least) in there, it just wouldn't work. Surely Apple sees how important gaming is with iOS and Steam?
I remember gettign the original unibody 15" MBP and feeling like i couldnt read text cause it was blurry and just off for lack of a better term.
I returned it (and no it was not for the screen, it was the portability) and got the 13" 2 years later, and I dont recall the same problem.
I also recently got the 4th gen ipod touch, and have just fallen in love with the screen, I have tried to look at my friends iphone, and my kids previous gen ipod touch, and they just don't look right. So while yes it may be overkill for the human eye it is appreciated. I suspect moreso on laptops and devices that are meant to be viewed at close range.
I returned it (and no it was not for the screen, it was the portability) and got the 13" 2 years later, and I dont recall the same problem.
I also recently got the 4th gen ipod touch, and have just fallen in love with the screen, I have tried to look at my friends iphone, and my kids previous gen ipod touch, and they just don't look right. So while yes it may be overkill for the human eye it is appreciated. I suspect moreso on laptops and devices that are meant to be viewed at close range.