[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by sebbbi

WOA (Windows on ARM) of course is very different, as it's designed only for ARM based tablets and is tightly integrated to the device (not sold separately). But I would assume that Microsoft implements similar sub-pixel font rendering system on WOA as well.

I assume the iPad doesn't have it because it takes too much CPU(/GPU?) resources? But I've no idea how much it really takes and how it's done. If it's too much for an A5, it's probably also too much for a Tegra 3?

[Ike Turner]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

I assume the iPad doesn't have it because it takes too much CPU(/GPU?) resources? But I've no idea how much it really takes and how it's done. If it's too much for an A5, it's probably also too much for a Tegra 3?

It's not CPU intensive at all AFAIK. Windows Phone 7 has it and it runs on relatively low end ARM SoCs..

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by Ike Turner

It's not CPU intensive at all AFAIK. Windows Phone 7 has it and it runs on relatively low end ARM SoCs..

In sub-pixel rendering, do you still align the characters to pixel boundaries? That is: the intra-character rendering is sub-pixel aware but the placement as a whole is not? This way, you can still easily use the GPU to blog them into position once you have them rendered to a cache.

(BTW: I'm taking this from memory that the iPad doesn't have it, but I may well be wrong on that one too...)

[Ike Turner]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

In sub-pixel rendering, do you still align the characters to pixel boundaries? That is: the intra-character rendering is sub-pixel aware but the placement as a whole is not? This way, you can still easily use the GPU to blog them into position once you have them rendered to a cache.

(BTW: I'm taking this from memory that the iPad doesn't have it, but I may well be wrong on that one too...)

Here's how it's supposed to work:
http://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx

The iPad, iPhone or any other devices besides Microsoft's (PC/Tablets running Windows 7+ and Windows Phones) don't have it AFAIK.
Some more talk about it over at http://www.displaymate.com/news.html

[Ailuros]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

I assume the iPad doesn't have it because it takes too much CPU(/GPU?) resources? But I've no idea how much it really takes and how it's done. If it's too much for an A5, it's probably also too much for a Tegra 3?

I couldn't imagine why the GPU wouldn't be capable of a form of spatial anti-aliasing which is what Clear Type actually does. While font AA shouldn't cost much on about any of the recent small form factor GPUs, guess whether the SGX or the ULP GF would use more bandwidth and memory footprint for it.

Besides the majority of the linked articles will point out that there's no "ideal" default ClearType setting and that's exactly the reason why Microsoft has a ClearType fine tuning application in its OSs in order for the user to pick what appears best to his eye according to the display medium he's actually using. I eventually even stumble upon users that have ClearType turned off on LCD/TFT displays because it supposedly "blurs" text for their taste. Not really true, but heck to each his own.

[Jubei]

Originally Posted by dlm

And yet, despite that, PC's still radically outsell Macs. They have done a bunch of things with the surface to convince consumers to buy them. Suicidally low pricing or an ultra-high resolution display are simply not among them. Whether or not those resonate with conusmers as a whole remains to be seen.

Thats a broad and vague statement since PC come in different price ranges and form factors. Hardly relevant to this specific argument. Apple has a 90% marketshare in the premium laptop segment and gets almost all the profit. So at the same pricepoint Macs destroy PCs. I could easily use a similar vague statement and include iPads in the discussion, wich according to NPD made Apple the worlds largest mobile PC supplier this quarter beating HP

Originally Posted by dlm

I have seen both iPads and screens that use similar technology to the Surface's screen, and we have hard numbers on the properties of the two screens. Many people have also seen Surface's screen and have spoken positively of its clarity.

So I'd say my argument sounds a lot better than, "But the resolution is lower so it must suck."

http://www.displaymate.com/news.html#11

DisplayMate did the same comparison you did and according to them:

"The Windows ClearType 768p display on the Asus Netbook was significantly sharper than the iPad 2 768p display but also significantly less sharp than the new iPad 3 1536p display."

And im pretty confident when people get the devices and can do unbiased testing they will come up with the same conclusion. But then again common sense would tell you this, if ClearType rendering would make a 768p screen as sharp as a 1536p screen, why did Microsoft use a 1080p screen for the Pro? Why drive up costs and batterylife? Funny how when someone asked them that same question on reddit, they ignored it

Originally Posted by dlm

You also seem to be implying that I've made some grand statement that Surface is going to immediately eat away all of iPad's market share. My point was significantly simpler than that. The single bullet point of resolution is simply not as important as you (and some others in this thread) are making it out to be.

That single bullet point becomes important when MS is already facing an uphill battle. When John Doe walks into the store, he is looking at an iPad wich he knows from his friends and overall reputation is a high quality product, he knows it has all the apps, he knows it has iTunes and he knows it has higher resolution screen. Apple doesnt need to convince people to buy iPads, they already wait in line to do it.. Microsoft is the one who needs to be convincing people they should buy their product over what "everyone else" is buying

[dlm]

Originally Posted by Jubei

Thats a broad and vague statement since PC come in different price ranges and form factors. Hardly relevant to this specific argument. Apple has a 90% marketshare in the premium laptop segment and gets almost all the profit. So at the same pricepoint Macs destroy PCs. I could easily use a similar vague statement and include iPads in the discussion, wich according to NPD made Apple the worlds largest mobile PC supplier this quarter beating HP

And yet somehow, Apple's share in premium laptops doesn't come from competing on price.

Originally Posted by Jubei

http://www.displaymate.com/news.html#11

DisplayMate did the same comparison you did and according to them:

"The Windows ClearType 768p display on the Asus Netbook was significantly sharper than the iPad 2 768p display but also significantly less sharp than the new iPad 3 1536p display."

The Asus netbook they tested may have the same resolution and ClearType as the surface, but does -not- have the same low-reflectivity glass. So no, they didn't do the same comparison at all.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that anyone here has argued that you don't increase the overall potential visible quality of a display by increasing resolution. Or that "ClearType is the answer." Or whatever. Obviously if you have the hardware space to put in a higher res display, it's a perfectly fine thing to do. They have said they didn't feel that it was going to be viable in RT, and they did other things to cover the gap. Pro is targetted as a larger, heavier device, and thus what can be fit in it is different.

Originally Posted by Jubei

That single bullet point becomes important when MS is already facing an uphill battle. When John Doe walks into the store, he is looking at an iPad wich he knows from his friends and overall reputation is a high quality product, he knows it has all the apps, he knows it has iTunes and he knows it has higher resolution screen. Apple doesnt need to convince people to buy iPads, they already wait in line to do it.. Microsoft is the one who needs to be convincing people they should buy their product over what "everyone else" is buying

And for the 10th time, the entire point is that you are massively overstating the importance of resolution in overall display quality, particularly in the degree to which it is important to "John Doe." It's easy to write an amusing anecdote about what you think "everyone" is going to care about. Some people will care, other's won't.

Microsoft is doing plenty of things to "convince people they should buy their product", but throwing in a very high res display that was likely to be too expensive and too heavy to be viable for the design goals of RT isn't one of them.

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Originally Posted by Ailuros

With adequate sub-pixel font rendering a lower resolution might not be an issue while zooming into text. However anyone will have a very hard time convincing me that there won't be any difference at all in 3D applications like textures f.e.

Frankly it's more the other way around. As the note about "resolution isn't everything, contrast factors in just as much" is getting at, high contrast, razor sharp edges are where this stuff matters. i.e. black text on white background and similar. In games where textures are filtered and often later post-processing blurs stuff, you're not really going for that look and your assets are not nearly as high contrast. In addition to lack of GPU power, most 3D applications don't render at native resolution on high-dpi displays like the iPad because frankly beyond a certain point you can't see the difference and it's just wasting time. If you have good multisample anti-aliasing, there's really no need to shade at those high frequencies visually.

Originally Posted by Ailuros

Besides the majority of the linked articles will point out that there's no "ideal" default ClearType setting and that's exactly the reason why Microsoft has a ClearType fine tuning application in its OSs in order for the user to pick what appears best to his eye according to the display medium he's actually using.

Right but that's because different displays can sometimes have different subpixel arrangements for the color components. If you control the display (i.e. in the surface), there is no need to have end user configuration. You can directly use the known subpixel arrangement to generate the anti-aliased edge.

[Ailuros]

It doesn't seem to make much difference if you take into account also the paragraph that followed the quoted one above:

With adequate sub-pixel font rendering a lower resolution might not be an issue while zooming into text. However anyone will have a very hard time convincing me that there won't be any difference at all in 3D applications like textures f.e.

On the other hand I've no idea what kind of performance drop anisotropic filtering comes with in the majority of cases on Tegra3 ULP GFs. If it's reasonable it's not really an issue either IMHO.

If I'd have the dilemma between 1280 with high quality anisotropic filtering vs. 2048 no AF, I'd obviously pick the first for better overall texture sharpness especially in the farther viewing distance IF the performance drop for AF isn't all too big. I haven't seen yet any benchmarks with AF on vs. off to see how each GPU behaves with it, but I wouldn't suggest that since the majority of those GPUs are either single or dual TMU that AF is for free.

In the case where AF typically costs too much I'd rather have 2048 no AF vs. 1280 no AF or any other higher resolution than the latter. Multisampling has obviously nothing to do with textures.

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

In sub-pixel rendering, do you still align the characters to pixel boundaries? That is: the intra-character rendering is sub-pixel aware but the placement as a whole is not? This way, you can still easily use the GPU to blog them into position once you have them rendered to a cache.

AFAIK, yes.

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by Ailuros

I couldn't imagine why the GPU wouldn't be capable of a form of spatial anti-aliasing which is what Clear Type actually does. While font AA shouldn't cost much on about any of the recent small form factor GPUs, guess whether the SGX or the ULP GF would use more bandwidth and memory footprint for it.

Besides the majority of the linked articles will point out that there's no "ideal" default ClearType setting and that's exactly the reason why Microsoft has a ClearType fine tuning application in its OSs in order for the user to pick what appears best to his eye according to the display medium he's actually using. I eventually even stumble upon users that have ClearType turned off on LCD/TFT displays because it supposedly "blurs" text for their taste. Not really true, but heck to each his own.

Font rasterization happens on the GPU on Win7. Idk but I am very doubtful it happens on the GPU on winrt. On DX11.1, more bits of it will be moved to the GPU.

[eastmen]

I'm sure that it came down to this at MS

Whats the best cost /performance/ quantity ARM SOC

Whats the best cost/quantity Screen that can be paired up well with the ARM SOC picked.

Then they applied a feature they already had in windows to beef it up. I'm certian the 1366x768 screen will look better than the ipad 2's screen . I'm sure with the bonding process they used and clear type it will look better than other1366x768 screens.

I'm sure in the right conditions it will look as good if not better than the ipad 3's retina display. But i'm sure 95-99% of the time the ipad 3 screen will look better.

But at the end of the day will the majority of users care about the screen resolution when they are actually using the device ?

[eastmen]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/20/3...out-delayed-uk

In the usa all stock (not just the base $500 model) is sold out and now have a 3 week wait time.

The uk sees a delay till Nov 2nd. People are saying its due to customs

[Jubei]

Originally Posted by dlm

And yet somehow, Apple's share in premium laptops doesn't come from competing on price.

Price matters when you dont have Apples brand name. Thats why Ultrabooks are getting their asses kicked by Macs despite the fact that they offer higher specs for the same price. Thats why Android tablets couldnt even make a dent in the marketshare until they went far below Apples price range

Originally Posted by dlm

The Asus netbook they tested may have the same resolution and ClearType as the surface, but does -not- have the same low-reflectivity glass. So no, they didn't do the same comparison at all.

Classic strawman. The DisplayMate article was a response to your claim that you had seen both iPads and along with screens that used ClearType and could thus compare them. Well ClearType is NOT sharper than a 1536p screen and you havent compared a Surface with its low-reflectivity glass to an iPad 3 so how can you now continue to claim its equal?




[

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by Jubei

Classic strawman. The DisplayMate article was a response to your claim that you had seen both iPads and along with screens that used ClearType and could thus compare them. Well ClearType is NOT sharper than a 1536p screen and you havent compared a Surface with its low-reflectivity glass to an iPad 3 so how can you now continue to claim its equal?
[

Probably because just about everyone who HAS seen it has claimed it is equal or better?

And once again that DisplayMate article cannot in anyway be representative of the difference between the Surface display and the iPad display except in very limited circumstances (very limited ambient lighting) where screen reflectivity won't factor in.

Regards,
SB

[Jubei]

Originally Posted by Silent_Buddha

Probably because just about everyone who HAS seen it has claimed it is equal or better?

And once again that DisplayMate article cannot in anyway be representative of the difference between the Surface display and the iPad display except in very limited circumstances (very limited ambient lighting) where screen reflectivity won't factor in.

Regards,
SB

A few people does not = just about everyone FYi

And the ones who made such claims like Peter Bright admitted this was under Microsofts controlled testing not an unbiased comparison.

[Ailuros]

Originally Posted by rpg.314

Font rasterization happens on the GPU on Win7. Idk but I am very doubtful it happens on the GPU on winrt. On DX11.1, more bits of it will be moved to the GPU.

It was a theoretical reply to silent's post: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...&postcount=451

If Apple would consider it as an option, it wouldn't had do anything with a windows OS obviously.

[idsn6]

My understanding was that iOS doesn't use subpixel font rendering mainly because the screens are freely rotatable. At least up to Windows 7, ClearType did not support the subpixel arrangement of portrait orientation monitors.

I don't know whether Windows 8/RT has changed this. It could be that Surface text looks sharp in landscape, but drops drastically in quality in portrait. I prefer to wait and see when it releases.

[dlm]

Originally Posted by Jubei

Classic strawman. The DisplayMate article was a response to your claim that you had seen both iPads and along with screens that used ClearType and could thus compare them. Well ClearType is NOT sharper than a 1536p screen and you havent compared a Surface with its low-reflectivity glass to an iPad 3 so how can you now continue to claim its equal?

I think you should look up the definition of straw man, because you have used 2 in this post alone.

First, I never said I was talking about cleartype screens. I was talking about low-reflectivity screens. Perhaps there was just a misunderstanding between us there.

I also never claimed that they are equal. What I claimed was that it is likely to look a whole lot better than you seem to think. I've said multiple times that I believe that higher resolution will provide a better picture in optimal lighting conditions, but that optimal conditions are unlikely.

I further claimed not that they were equal, but that the differences were not likely to be terribly material to the average consumer. However, I have said at least 3 times in this thread that there are certainly -some- consumers who will care, and that that's just the tradeoff MS decided to make.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by Jubei

Classic strawman. The DisplayMate article was a response to your claim that you had seen both iPads and along with screens that used ClearType and could thus compare them.

He said "technology similar to Surface", not specifically cleartype. For example, look at the Lumia 900 screen and compare it to, say, the higher resolution iPhone 4S screen. The contrast really makes a difference, both with low ambient light (due to AMOLED) and high ambient light (due to the clearblack coating).

[Jubei]

Originally Posted by Mintmaster

He said "technology similar to Surface", not specifically cleartype. For example, look at the Lumia 900 screen and compare it to, say, the higher resolution iPhone 4S screen. The contrast really makes a difference, both with low ambient light (due to AMOLED) and high ambient light (due to the clearblack coating).

I dont think you will find a single credible source claiming Lumia 900 has a sharper screen (wich is what MS claims with surface and ipad) now outdoor visibility etc is different

dlm point taken and i apologize. I misinterpreted

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by Jubei

I dont think you will find a single credible source claiming Lumia 900 has a sharper screen (wich is what MS claims with surface and ipad) now outdoor visibility etc is different

dlm point taken and i apologize. I misinterpreted

having used both outside in the summer the 900 certianly has a sharper screen when the sun is out in force. Visibility directly corolates to sharpness

The surface screen wont look as good as the ipad screen 95% of the time , but if it looks almost as good thats all that matters at the end of the day. Perception

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by Jubei

I dont think you will find a single credible source claiming Lumia 900 has a sharper screen (wich is what MS claims with surface and ipad) now outdoor visibility etc is different

You have a real penchant for putting words in peoples' mouths. First you assumed dlm was saying ClearType alone makes a low res screen better than the new iPad, and now you assume I'm talking about sharpness when I never mentioned anything of the sort. I don't care about any company's PR material.

I'm talking about display quality, and so were you at one point. Contrast has long been the most important metric for display quality. Even on a large HDTV where PPI isn't near the limits of human resolving power, I and most people would choose a 720p screen with 5,000:1 contrast over a 1080p screen with 1,000:1 contrast in a blind test. Personally, I doubt I'll ever buy a cell phone with LCD again after having AMOLED, as true blacks on a display are a thing of beauty. I certainly wouldn't choose a 1080p LCD over a 720p AMOLED.

As for the Lumia 900 vs iPhone4, most people who actually compare the screens as opposed to just looking at specs put the screens on par with each other, despite the lower PPI of the Lumia.

[ninelven]

Originally Posted by Mintmaster

Contrast has long been the most important metric for display quality.

Which explains the prevalence of standard definition black & white televisions today....

[RudeCurve]

Originally Posted by ninelven

Which explains the prevalence of standard definition black & white televisions today....