My analysis and comments on the Retina Display were widely distorted and transformed into an attack on Apple and Steve Jobs — they were not. I simply did a quantitative analysis of what was said in the context of my campaign to eliminate (or more realistically reduce) exaggeration in display specs. Apple's claim falls under glorious wording rather than numerical spec abuse — and even with quantitative analysis it's minor compared to what other manufacturers are saying. I sent Steve Jobs an Email explaining that and got a reply from him.But, of course, Soneira is using a different metric to determine resolutionality.
I got an iPhone 4. A DPI this high is indeed pretty rad. I've never seen text that looks this good. I just want to know why my fricking two thousand dollar laptop can't do this. For many years things were stuck at <>Well, your laptop display is probably a lot larger. It probably has more total pixels then your iPhone's display. There are also some android phones that have similar display resolutions (250dpi rather then 300), and apparently some Windows Mobile phones have display resolution that's just as high, but then you'd be using windows mobile.
300 DPI @ 15 inches using a 1.6:1 display would be quad HD (3840x2400). For those of your playing the home game that's 70 megs for a 32-bit double buffered frame buffer before even considering the massive texture sizes required for the windows themselves in any sort of backing store.Windowing systems don't use textures to store background windows, the operating system directs the application that owns that window to redraw itself when more of it is shown. That's why on old PCs the windows would flicker when you move them around. Modern OSes might cache window displays, though, since they have so much memory.
The iPhone 4 in comparison uses 4.6 megs for a double buffered frame buffer and doesn't really require a backing store because there's not multiple windows to composite.
That's texture memory, though. It's not for pixel resolution. Graphics cards don't push out, say, a 1600x1200 bitmap however many times a second. They draw shapes with textures on them.You obviously don't understand how this works. Old 2D video cards worked by storing a single framebuffer. Every time the screen refreshed a custom microchip, not the CPU would read data out of the frame buffer, convert it to an analogue signal, and send it to the screen. It's only when the screen changes that the CPU needs to do anything.
Look at it this way. 3640x2400x32 is 294,912,000 bits of data per frame. To get 30 frames per second, you need to be processing 8.8 billion bits per second. Even assuming determining what a single color in a single pixel should be is something you can map to a single processor calculation, not a lot of systems can operate in the 8.8ghz range.
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posted by seagull.apollo at 10:48 PM on June 26, 2010