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Super LCD Screens: 200 PPI
crovira wrote to us with an article from the NYT (free reg. req'd.) Apparently, both Toshiba and IBM are dissatisified with the current state of monitor development. To that end, they've created some wondrous toys like 16.5" LCD screens that display 200 PPI. They've run into a most curious problem however: Legacy software/drivers. Click thru to read more - and if IBM should want to send a couple screens my way, I'd see what we can whip up around the office *grin*.
True Type tends to have better hinting for low resolution devices like a CRT screen, while Type1 gives better output on high resolution devices such as printers. With these high resolution LCD screens, Type1 may be a better choice.
Also, remember that while scrollbars, entry boxes and the like can already be any size you want them, on a high-res display, the 3D effects will get lost as they'll be too small to see, for example. Converting these to vectors will help. But bear in mind that not everything is suitable for conversion to vectors. Many enlightenment and gtk themes, for example, would be all but impossible to make into vectors.
I suspect what we'll end up with is a halfway house where theme designers will have to make multiple versions for various resolutions, much like we have 75 and 100dpi bitmaps fonts now.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I remember they did something similar with an earlier version of OS/2. It really pissed me off. I reconfigured a OS/2 box such that instead of the default 640x480 it was working in 1024x764, only to find that IBM in its infinite wisdom was now showing all the text at the same size as before, only with higher resolution.
Very clever, they no doubt thought, the 9 point text is still 9 point text - only smoother. Of course, what I actually wanted was more bloody text on the screen - and bugger the point size.
I'm pretty sure they played the same game with the icons too. Damn their eyes.
When I get my hands on one of these 200dpi LCDs I do not want one of IBM's inflating pixel drivers with it.
Regards, Ralph.
Two questions
First of all with my limited experience doing low level graphics I seem to remember only being able to write to the screen during the horizontal or vertical refresh of the monitor. Do these new LCDs emulate this to allow legacy software and etc...
Second is their a new all digital standard for connecting these to video cards. With no analog components this would seem to get better quality and allow me to have a longer monitor cord.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
The display hardware is bitmapped anyway (I think it's harder to make a CRT that can steer the beam arbitrarily, as the old vector scopes did, than to make a raster CRT) - and intrinsically so if it's an LCD. There's going to be bitmapped graphics code somewhere at the bottom.
However, you can implement a resolution-independent layer above that, e.g. Display Postscript/NeWS or Display PDF.
I am very happy that neither my work nor my home desktop have a display that involves steering an electron beam (Hint: what do the initials "LCD" in the title of the story to which these comments are all attached refer to?).
I am unconvinced that going back to vector CRT monitors would make things better.
If you are having problems with 10pt fonts looking small then your system is broken. A point, by definition, is 1/72 inch high. This is regardless of resolution, so the system should be scaling the font's pixel representation based on the actual screen resolution.
X, at least, gets this right. I am running my 21" screen at 2000x1500 and all the fonts are fine. Everything in Netscape, application menus, and the window manager are perfectly readable and about the physical size I would expect from the point sizes I have chosen.
-jwb
Maybe if you're only using gtk/qt based apps, someone could throw together a theme to size up their widgets. Anyone know if the theme support is flexible enough to allow an easy scaling up of all apps that use these toolkits?
Ah, an opportunity to plug the Berlin windowing system! How sweet!
In Berlin, rendering the vector-based description of the GUI to actual pixels is done at a very late stage, thus allowing almost anything (CRT, LCD, sport arena jumbotrons(!)) to act as visual device - just rewrite the rendering and output modules & off you go.
With the varying resolutions on screens (PDA->CRT->this new LCD), this is the natural next step in GUI development.
I've got a Sharp Ultralight PC with a supurb LCD (TFT) screen. There is no ghosting. I've played right through Quake II on it, no problems (though I recommend MS's Dual Strike controller). My primary work screen is the LCD screen on this portable. I'm looking at it at least 8 hours a day. The definition, brightness and contrast are all very pleasant on the eyes. I have never suffered headaches.
The only "bad" thing I have noticed is that areas of heavy bands of BLACK and WHITE can cast a slightly noticable shadow above and below them on the screen. I think Fox's news site background graphic is an example. Probably something to do with an "array" of wiring (or something)...
hese folks have upped the resolution to 3200x2400. That's nearly impossible to read even on a 24 inch SGI monitor
I can read xterm's "tiny" font with no problem on my SGI 1600 Flat Panel at 1600x1024 resolution. The same font is unreadable on a 21" CRT monitor at 1280x1024. Comparing resolutions between CRTs and plasmas is apples to oranges - the clarity of a plasma panel is akin to getting glasses after your eyesight has gradually deteriorated: you simply can't believe how much better you can see, and how much more seldom those headaches kick in.
You are correct in noting that the resolution increase is such that all but the largest point (pixel) fonts we're used to today would become unreadable, even on a flat panel. But you (or others, anyway) would be surprised at just how clear and readable tiny print is on a flat panel, as opposed to a continuously scanning (and distorting) CRT.
The solution is, as others have said, a level of abstraction between the physical world "length" and "area" screen measurements and the digital world "size" in pixels, preferably with user definable mappings between the two for "arbitrary" virtual resolution ranging from "unreadable" to "large enough for all but the completely blind."
Maybe IBM could ship off a display in the direction of the XFree86 group...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
What was NextStep about?
NextStep = OS X
OS X is Apple's GUI on top of NextStep. Remember when Apple bought NEXT a few years back. They didn't reinvent the wheel. They own it.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Ok corporate, listen up..
OPEN THE HARDWARE SPECS, and sit back to watch the magic happen.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Maybe I'm constrained by my understanding of technology...
If you had a flourescent gas encased between two plastic sheets, and activated it via a combination of RGB lasers and priming lasers, you could conceiveable get infinite resolution displays, assuming the motors and laser pulses could accomodate the speed, and that the data bus could feed the device high enough.
And there is no reason for the lasers not to fire paralle to the surface of display; just use two intersecting lasers to 'activate' the gas.
Just a random thought
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Can you answer another question, hypothetically?
Can windows support WMF images instead of BMPs and ICOs in the dlls that generate all the desktop/widget icons?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I see what you're talking about, but it would require that Windows itself support .WMF images as an alternative format to the .BMP and and .ICO for desktop icons and widgets; I've never seen any mention that Windows has that kind of functionality, though I've never looked for it either. If there is support, at the OS level, for WMF icon files and data, then Windows would be, as you suggest, capable of going straight to vector-ish scalable displays.
Though it obviously doesn't help that every windows program today has bmps and icos embedded within DLLs, and aren't in any sort of realistically scaleable format.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
It's not so much a legacy driver problem, so much as a lack of foresight on the OS people's side! NeXT has had a solution for this problem for over a decade, and it looks like MacOS X will also be able to overcome this hurdle very easily; Display Postscript and Quartz, the PDF version of the above. I guess you could call this legacy software...
I'd imagine an Apple handheld using a 3x4 inch 200dpi display(that's 800x600! wow) would be awesome. Or a 19" LCD for their pro series desktop, when they can scale to that size... 3000x2200 here! Or imagine nextgen gameboys with monocle displays; a 1x1" display would easily match today's gameboy resolution of 144x144 pixels. Or a PDA with a monocle display!
I wonder how Apple is going to try to capitalize on their ability to display 128x128 pixel icons and their Quartz Display PDF capabilities? Right off the bat the icons would be larger than 5/8, which is about right, if on the small size. I'm not sure it was explicitly mentioned, but Toshiba are only shipping 4" and 6" screens; were IBM's not limited to that size, by omission of detail?
Wow. Cool.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Yes it would be cool.
NeXT had display postscript over 10 years ago.
Apple now has display PDF in their upcoming MacOS X.
So your prayers are answered, and they have been done so by the man called Jobs. Fear.
Anyway, it may be that Apple can support this right off the bat, with their vector based display system, Quartz, and 128pix icons, etc. All of a sudden, it seems everything is going Apple's way. Hmmm.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Isn't the large Icon's setting in Plus! allow for support of 64x64 icons?
Of course, that's actually still too small, and it doesn't scale very intelligently, but it's a step in the direction. I'm betting Apple will be able to leverage this new display technology and wow everyone =)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Just a question - if the problem is icons sized in pixels, would systems that use something like Display PDF help, since (presumably) they would know about point sizes, and thus render big enough to see? If so, Apple might be interested...
It's had that since Windows 95 at least.
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Two other factors in why video looks "better" on a TV than on a monitor: TVs have a slightly different gamma than monitors, so video images tend to look duller on computer monitors unless this is compensated for; and the biggy: TV's sloppy analog signal processing effectively gives you antialiasing for free, smoothing out image imperfections that are glaringly obvious on a computer monitor. (Mind, the difference in bandwidths of the chroma and luma signals can give you weird color-crawl effects in closely striped areas on a TV screen.)
-- Alastair
Windows resolution independant? You could write an app resoulution independantly, but that's not all. Just setting "Use large fonts" is not going to do a lot of good at 3200x2400.
By making icons and text vector graphics (or something along the same lines), you could make it entirely scaleable. That is, "rendered" real-time, although I'm sure that term isn't quite applicable.
Hmm.. better example: If you go into Adobe Photoshop and use the text tool to write "Hi Mom" and then resize the image (without flattening the layers) to be four times the pixel depth, which makes the image larger, you don't lose any image quality. It's not just zooming in, it's using the algorithms that define the curvature and lines of the letters (or vector graphics) to re-calculate the shape down to more specific pixels. It isn't "zooming in" in the traditional sense.
That's exactly why picture quality on a television is better than a computer screen. Because tv-screens are so crude, they 'blend' together pixels, creating a smoother picture. Ordinary television has a resolution of about 600x400, in computer terms, yet it looks more realistic.
This is because your brains do something similar: images are picked up in pixels (a limited number of light sensitive cells) and combined into an image. The individual pixels aren't important, but the overall image is. So your brain doesn't process the individual cells. It rather combines the signals from clusters of cells, with some cells physically located together, participating in different signals. Several of these signal channels (nerves) interact together.
So, the quality of screens depends on your definition of quality. Do you think it's better if it's more realistic, or better if you can put smaller elements on it, whether you can discern them or not? I think it's not a set criterium, but rather dictated by purpose and circumstances.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Scaling the graphics shouldn't be that difficult. But them sites that use pixel-specified tables may be in trouble.
2,200x1100 pixels in antialiasing.
Smoooth like silk.
Not largely relevant to the rest of the article, but...
For picture quality, however, many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV.
Uuuuh.... what? Someone needs to lay off the crack rock. The average computer monitor is like
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Seems like this is the ideal position for the OOS communtiy to jump in.
:-)
<i>At I.B.M., Dr. Wisnieff's laboratory rewrote the underlying code of Windows NT to inflate its display pixel counts. Lotus, a unit of I.B.M., also created a high-resolution-compatible version of its word processor.</i>
With the open availability of specs, OSS programers should be able to step in and provide a solution without something as drastic as a rewrite of NT. (The fact that an IBM lab has access to the NT source strikes me as odd for a whole other reason. Woder is they can fix the rest oif it while they are at it
It also should serve as a heads-up for all app developers, as something that will become an issue in the future. These monitors are going to be designed for the medium end desktop, and Linux has the ability to be ready for when these things arrive, without having to re-write everything.
--sugarman--
Given this, why should this cause a holdup?
They (IBM) also have an interesting bio up on Robert L. Wisnieff Manager, Advanced Display Technology Laboratory. Interesting if you can ignore the market spin at least :).
Noel
RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix
kayaking
Dodgy Maths Mate...
17" by 80ppi is 1360 pixels wide, so you are using a screen roughly 12 pixels high? 14" by 80ppi is 1120, the resolution is 1360x1120 (or to be more useful, 1600x1200) which is 1,523,200 (1,920,000) pixels on the screen. Not 16320.
At 200ppi (3200x2400) there would be 7,680,000 pixels on the screen (not 40,800).
The simple solution to icons is to make them big (256x256) and truecolour, and then scale them down to fit in a certain area of the screen. Funnily enough though, at 200ppi, your biggest icon would be 1.25" on a side. I can live with 0.75" on a side icons, but any smaller... no way.
X will survive, but themes won't scale, and icons will have to be redone. I think that someone out there should start working on 256x256 icons for every program they can think of, 64x64 is just too small.
~~
Following up to my own post...
256x256 truecolour icons would take up 256k of memory. My desktop currently has around 40 different icons on it.. that would be 10Mb of my memory, and I know that with several windows open and some applications running etc that could easily go up to 160 icons, which is 40Mb of my memory.
I think that even for the most complex of icons a vector representation would result in a smaller icon than 256k! Looking at the Word icon, hmmm, that could be done in around 1k (a rectangle, a 'W', some lines of text and a stamp). Yep, vector icons are the way to go, not bitmap.
Silly me! MacOS X could be outdated with its great technology - they won't be scaling their icons down, they will have to scale them up to be legible, even at 128x128! :-)
~~
Probably why Apple has gone to display PDF in its next operating system then?
They have obviously seen this thing coming along - in a couple of years most laptops will have min 1600x1200 screens, probably 2048x1536 even, and do you want to hunt for those icons on that screen (shhh, don't even think of 200x100 character terminals).
This calls for a scalable desktop - one where things are specified in DPI and not pixels. Apple has done it. Windows hasn't, and won't until people start moaning (my taskbar is 1/8" high, I can't read the text...) but what about X?
~~
I agree that the G400 is up near the top of current 2d video technolgy, which only strengthens the original point about these 200dpi 16" LCD devices - the world's not ready for them!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Indeed, video card technology needs to move forward a bit before this is useful. At these resolutions, you're using 7 GB/s of video memory bandwidth just to output at 60 fps, 24bpp!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
While an analogue signal can theoretically represent an infinite number of colours, in the real world noise gets in the way. So an analogue signal can only represent a finite number of usable, distinguishable colours.
However, this is not what is meant by colour gamut. Every graphics signal will use some colour space to describe colours: modern monitors use RGB, meaning that the colour of a pixel is described as a triple of red, green and blue intensities, all of which must be positive. TVs use (for historical reasons) a stranger colour space of chroma, luminance and - er - something else. Printers use CMYK, etc etc.
The colour gamut is the set of colours that it is possible to express in a colour space. Because our vision system is a bit interesting, and because the world is never perfect, colour spaces that are physically realisable can never display every shade of every colour. Some have better gamuts that others, meaning they can display more colours than others.
So the previous poster was saying that the colour space used to display NTSC television happens to suck when trying to describe red, because while it is analogue, some shades of red are just outside its range.
Monitors are better, but you actually you can't make a device using three primary colours that can equal the real world. Even with a monitor, bright shades of cyan, say, will be displayed as mixtures of blue and green. A mixture is inherently less saturated than a pure colour. Now you can always get a brighter, more saturated cyan from a cyan-coloured laser, for instance, or a painter's pigment. This will be true for every colour that is a mixture of primaries.
Colour spaces have been defined, like the CIE space, that can describe all perceivable colours. They use some mathematical trickery to define "super-saturated" primaries, in other words red, green and blue that are brighter and more pure than physically possible. So you can't make a monitor to display it.
I propose
Multiple Alpha processors,(screw that SMP stuff. Three-way!) a G400 and two of these babies? Complete with MD, DVD-R and a *nix kernel with all of the 'legacy' support ripped sound good? We'll hand roll it all in assembler for performance!
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Windows tried, at least.. I remember discussion of using an alternate representative unit in Windows95.. They ended up using a modified, braindamaged 'TWIPS' system again..
Doing it wouldn't be hard. Just assume a 800x600 grid, regardless of screen size, and specify coords based on it. You wouldn't break legacy applications, because they'd see a 800x600 screen.
X is even easier! Toss a 'target sized theme' on BlackBox or Enlightenment. Or, better yet, write a userland application that dynamically resets the WM fonts, terminal fonts, and icons based on resolution. You'd have to restart the WM every resolution change to reread the altered settings, but that is a small price to pay for 4000x3000!!
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The topic wasn't what was needed to look good, but complete cutting edge redesign
After looking at the interesting stuff Transmeta has patented on round-robin streaming to arbitrated processors, I'd like to see one in action. And what processor would shine the best in an application unconcerned with x86 support? Well, the Sun Ultra or Compaq Alpha, and I just have a Alpha preference.
It was a silly response, granted, but it was a silly idea I was responding to..
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1. As far as I know, all of the existant multiprocessor systems rely on the processor^2 scheme. (Well, the 'Amiga' PPC/68K assymetric scheme comes to mind, but that was a trade off) The only scheme I've heard of that can use odd # of processors is probably going to be wasted on the Crusoe II. (Transmeta has a cool arbitrated 'sharing' patent. It's what I was thinking of!)
2. The G400 represents the bleeding edge for 2d cards. It still may suck in terms of upper limit resolution, but it's probably the best we've got. (And it has the odd snafu with anything above 1880x1440, although the stated limit is much higher)
I don't think it's video card technology that will need to improve: It's memory speed! S/D/RDRAM isn't keeping pace with the processor wars. Processor speed almost doubled in the last year, while memory only got 20-30% faster. Don't get me started on the fact I've seen 8 year old SCSI setups toast UDMA/66.
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I had Windows in mind whan I said that.. I run my display at work at 1600x1200, and have you tried reading the titlebars, at standard '8' font size? Not kind the eyes more than a few feet away. Same with Word. Unless you're print previewing, the font size is never adjusted to screen resolution.. Courier 6 point, is acceptable as printed but illegible on screen!!
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The newer LCD/plasma displays are stunning! I've owned an IBM for a few years now with what was the best display offered on any 'light' laptop, and the displays on some of the new top of the line Dell and Compaq offerings are so crisp and so deep I said 'Wow' outloud at the display on the Inspiron 700.. I would take that display over my IBM, Sony and NEC 21's...
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Make them for an entirely new system, designed from the ground up with the newest technologies. I think that it is about time that entirely new systems not based on the old x86 systems succeeded in the mainstream. I realize that it
would be quite a feat, but just think about the raw power you could get from new chips and equipment that didn't have to be compatible with old chips/code/peripherals.
Well unfortunately most people don't want to buy totally new things. I ceternally don't. I would love to get the maxium life out of anything until it is completely broken and then if I have to then buy something. I guess some people never really care.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Well, those people in the commercial moved it around the house pretty easily... Well, those people in the commercial moved it around the house pretty easily...
Well that would work really good until you get massive concussions and skull factures because your flat pannel TV fel onto your cranium.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Many, if not most of these are _digital_, while the old monitor in front of you is analog--there is a D/A conversion in the graphics card or in the monitor box. Plus there are a whole lot more pixels. A maxed out graphics card for one
of these babies might have 64 meg of VRAM. Egad. Without the D/A conversion, things like autoaliasing work differently too, so they will have some really low level impacts on the design of drivers. You probably won't be at all
happy if you just plug one of these babies into your box.
Well if they make one that fits into an ISA slot I will be a happy person.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I'm sure there can be some compatability mode for older applications while everyone starts putting vector image resources into their win32 modules.
PostScript has a lot of features in that respect. And since this display would require a video card with an ungodly amount of RAM and it'd have to push an ungodly number of pixels, why not build a fast PostScript interpreter right into the Display? That could be cool...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's not true. Your computer has no idea what the size of your monitor is. 1600x1200 looks entierely different on a 17" monitor compared with a 21" monitor. There is no way for it to raise the size of 10pt text and have it look good on both monitors.
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Funny, I think the resolution of broadcast quality NTSC video on a 30 inch television sucks ass compared to a finely tuned, 1600x1200 21" computer monitor. Modern monitors are far superior to consumer televisions for the simple reason that you sit a lot closer to them. That, and the fact that broadcast standards (ie NTSC, PAL, etc) are a bitch to make high quality.
I mean really, most displays will at least display standard VGA... That way if you don't have a proper driver, you can go to the lowest common denominator.
Of course if you are running something such as XFree or Windows, there will probably be a driver. After all, if you have drivers for those two, you've got better than 90% of everything supported.
This technology will significantly increase the potential feeling of reality derived from a virtual environment. The computer screen will seem like a window into another world, and computer art will be able to ascend to grand new heights. However, computer games addiction rates might also increase. As all computing technology improves, people will lose all capacity to handle the world outside of a computer. They will be reduced to formless, drooling blobs, their eyes never budging an inch from the images on their screens. Or did I just describe you?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
This is going to keep the costs way up there for at least several years. If they are targeting the 30M+ Win customers they are going to need to get the price to come way down. Pretty cool though, I've seen some of those displays they have in the newer A-10 jets, they are very sharp and surprizingly tough, the overall resoulution was sorta like looking at a magazine photo.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Maybe it's that the fleet of developers are busy working on SP2??
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
"The problem isn't in the display driver!"
Nope, it's the assumptions that programmers make about screen resoultion. The solution might lie in using 'third generation 2d engines' as discussed in a story on slashdot one or two weeks ago. Apple's MacOS X will use such an engine. Basically it's vectorbased graphics they are using. This means that the GUI is resolution independent and that anything you display on it will scale nicely from a ancient 14 inch monitor to a modern laser printer.
It wouldn't surprise me if these screens will be available for mac os X first.
Jilles
The issue at hand is not that "corporate" is not willing to open up the specs. The real problem is the fundamental way most OSes realize their GUI on the display. They were designed with the "traditional" monitors in mind. With new monitors from IBM/Toshiba that supports double the resolution in the same amount of space, everything - icons, menu bars, EVERYTHING looks half as small on the monitor. What we realy need is let go of everything bitmap, and implement the GUI in vector and True Type Fonts.
The problem isn't in the display driver! A good 16 LCD at 80ppi will pull 1280x1024. These folks have upped the resolution to 3200x2400. That's nearly impossible to read even on a 24 inch SGI monitor; everything is miniscule! Imaging trying to read that image, complete with tiny 10pt fonts and 80x80 icons, condensed into 16.5 inches! Thats the problem!
Quake ought to look good on that sucker..
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OK. Here's another take. Many newer games using 3D API's have to be written with resolution independence. For instance, on an old 3DFX Voodoo, you're not going to be able to push 30fps in the newest games unless you run at 640x480 or maybe 800x600. But on your brand spanking new GeForce 256 DDR you can do 1280x1024 at like 60 fps.
I don't really understand how everything under the hood works, but it appears to me that when a game needs to display 2D graphics, sprites, or entire 2D UI's, it makes calls to the 3D libraries, loading these graphics as textures that the accelerator can then scale, rotate, and all that other fun stuff. Load up Quake 3 and look at the main menu. The text is the same size no matter what resolution you're at and unless you're in some absurdedly high resolution, it doesn't pixelate, and the graphics card automatically anti-aliases the pixels.
Display Postscript, Display PDF, and other forthcoming display technologies rely a lot on software and still treat the computer display as a raster medium. These will be interim solutions, but if the proper hooks aren't put into these software components for hardware acceleration, things like Display PDF will overrun the processor at very very high resolutions.
How about this? Let's treat the video memory area in the graphics card as a canvas and draw vector graphics in it. These will naturally include bitmaps with physical size information, and even a legacy "raster canvas" mode to accomidate legacy applications. Then all that has to happen is the graphics card does the rasterizing to whatever absurd resolution you need and pipes it to the display.
A few things this implementation has the ability to do:
1) Support everything NOW. In legacy modes, you'd get anti-aliased scaling, much like when I change my resolution on this LCD monitor in front of me to 640x480. Sure, you wouldn't get the benifit of 200 ppi, but at least you would have a crisper screen to look at (one of the things that annoys me most about my flat panel is that you can see the individual Pixels and the grid in between them)
2) Take a lot of the graphics burden off of the CPU -- the performance increase from the modifications made to DirectX 7.0 to accomidate the GeForce and a "GPU" in general really beg for the same kind of GPU idea to migrate back to 2D, where it will be needed to support massive resolutions needed in the future. Gradients, scrolling, and moving entire solid windows and widgets around are some of the most CPU intensive operations that can be done (check your meter while running E with all the bells and whistles on!) This are things that should be done by the video card anyway. Let's see some people start putting hooks in there software and OS's to allow this! Stop thinking in pixels already!
3) Support legacy apps on new software/hardware in the future. Load a rater-drawn app into a texture buffer and a virtual "screen" that has pixel dimensions, then scale those pixels on the canvas appropriately.
So anyway, I guess we'll see now how this idea will hold up.
~GoRK
For example, SGI has long provided scalable icons for its IRIX desktop file manager. Apple's new Quartz graphics API and Aqua GUI look like they may have the start of this flexibility. OpenGL may be a good base to work from as well.
As someone who spends way too much time reading text on computer monitors, I look forward to any improvements in their readability!
Tim