[PATCH 0/2] Support for high DPI outputs via scaling

[Todd Showalter]

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:

> Also, I agree that you're going to have mixed setups.  Like you said, people
> replace their laptops fairly frequently.  However, I have a monitor sitting
> on my desk that I bought in 2004 and it's still working perfectly with no
> dead pixels.  Even if I go out next year and buy an super hi-res laptop,
> I'll still plug it into that monitor as an external.  I think we can expect
> mixed setups for quite some time.

    True; I guess my point there is that I'm betting that in the next
year or so the CCFL on your LCD monitor will go, and you're going to
be junking it.  It seems like the backlight on CCFL LCD monitors has a
MTTF of around a decade, and aftermarket replacement of CCFLs is
neither easy nor financially sensible from what I've seen.

> Also, you have to remember what drives buying monitor A over monitor B.  A
> lot of the reason to bump from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200 or 1920x1080 is screen
> space.  You can put a lot more windows (and therefore get more work done) on
> a 1920x1080 screen than on the old 1280x1024 screen.  With the bump to 4k,
> you don't get a bump in space, just resolution.  Therefore, I don't know how
> jumpy people are going to be to replace the 1920x1080 screen with one that's
> more expensive but doesn't grant them extra room to work.  I don't think the
> switch to 4k will be as rapid as you are suggesting.

    What I think is going to happen is the TV makers will be pushing
4K for the "home theatre" market, and will hope to convince people
with TVs to upgrade to 4K.  There's been a lot of noise over 4K this
year, mostly because 3DTV has been dead in the water, TVs are becoming
super cheap commodity items (the price of a big TV has come down by a
literal order of magnitude in the past decade; I remember seeing 50"
plasma TVs for $20K CDN, now I can have one for less than $2K CDN, and
that doesn't even take a decade of inflation into account), and the
manufacturers are desperate to find a way to convince people that
their current TV is horribly obsolete and needs replacing.  It sounds
like the push is going to be for 4K TVs paired with 4K-capable bluray.

    Once they shift manufacturing over to 4K panels, they're going to
want to spin down the 1080p panel lines, and when that happens the
1080p monitors start to move to a less desirable part of the
supply/demand curve.

    That's why we're at 1080p now, when five years ago it was fairly
easy to find 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 panels.  The TV market brings
economy of scale to a specific panel size, and whatever they settle on
is what's going to be cheap.  Computers users aren't driving the
market.

    The recent upswing in the availability of LED backlights may
change things; I'm not sure.  In theory, LED backlights ought to have
a far longer MTTF; at that point I'm guessing that it's going to be
the longevity of the power supply that dominates the service life of
monitors.  Maybe that means hardware will stick around longer.

    The point, though, is that while we can argue timeframe, we're
clearly rapidly approaching peak 1080p, and the future isn't lower
def.

>>     Is there a way to bypass the scaling?  When I'm using the mouse in
>> a game, I want to know the pixel position of the pointer, with no
>> scaling applied.  I'm going to be drawing the gui at native res, and I
>> want the mouse to interact with it at native res.
>
> I think that's supposed to be solved by wl_pointer giving sub-pixel
> accuracy.

    I suppose as long as I know the scale factor, I can reverse the scaling.

                                       Todd.

--
 Todd Showalter, President,
 Electron Jump Games, Inc.