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Ancient X11 scaling technology

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Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#191

Post by simoncion »

kiwijamo wrote: post #147
rwmj wrote: post #46

It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.

I used to see it all the time on X11. I'd see it on YouTube/Firefox. I'd see it on VLC. I'd see it on MPV. Any video player, playing any fast paced video you'll see X11 struggle to keep up with drawing full frames that it'd just give up and draw half of one frame and another half of another frame and call it a day. The Intel driver luckily had an xorg.conf setting I could add to make this less of an issue -- I guess…

> Any video player, playing any fast paced video you'll see X11 struggle to keep up with drawing full frames that it'd just give up and draw half of one frame and another half of another frame and call it a day.

What hardware are you running on?

Among the many systems I have, I have a laptop running an Intel 945GM [0]. I don't see the behavior you're reporting even if I have it hooked up [1] to a 1080p external display. On that system, I have zero Xorg config files... it's all default settings.

I also don't see the behavior you report on any of my much more powerful systems.

[0] Integrated graphics chip released somewhere around 2006

[1] Via VGA cable!

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#192

Post by simoncion »

nullc wrote: post #107
rwmj wrote: post #46

It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.

If someone shows it to you, you'll recognize it. It's when one frame shows part of the prior frame and part of the next. It's most visible in moderate speed horizontal pans as an interruption in vertical lines in the picture. It's nice to not have tearing. But IMO the functionality loss vs X11 isn't worth it for anything but a dedicated media playback/editing device.

> It's nice to not have tearing.

If you're running AMD hardware, try enabling the TearFree option. [0] I've been using this for years and years and years and it works fine.

[0] See this for a config file you could plop into place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44375247>

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#193

Post by simoncion »

LionEgo wrote: post #182
rwmj wrote: post #46

It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.

It depends on the game/application and what you are running and your distro may have enabled TearFree for you. I use Debian and it isn't enabled by default. If I was to play Dark Souls 3 and/or Elden ring on Linux without tearfree. There is significant screen tearing and the game feels very choppy when playing. To enable TearFree on Xorg. You typically make a new configuration file that sits in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/…

> (it is the video itself not YouTube being a resource hog, I checked)

Did you check by downloading the video and playing it with a good standalone video player like mplayer, vlc, or mpv? If you didn't, then you didn't disentangle the web browser from the video playback.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#194

Post by kllrnohj »

wmf wrote: post #157
kllrnohj wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the approach used in this blog post requires rdp. It's not drawing using X, so there's no vector network transparency.

Nope, this post is using GLX over the network.

Nope, that's indirect rendering and is limited to OpenGL 1.4 more or less. This is using a much newer OpenGL than that.

Also if you look at the source it's specifying direct rendering in glxCreateContext: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/xtoys/v/tip/f/circle.c & https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL-Refpages/gl2.1/xhtml/glX...

The only thing leaving that process is a pixbuf, zero X11, identical to Wayland.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#195

Post by kllrnohj »

uecker wrote: post #162
kllrnohj wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the approach used in this blog post requires rdp. It's not drawing using X, so there's no vector network transparency.

Clients can draw locally and composite remotely. I do not see the issue.

draw locally composite remotely is literally Wayland's philosophy and is one of the biggest contentious issues for the pro-X11 crowd.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#196

Post by p_l »

em-bee wrote: post #176
kelnos wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely do that on X11, but you have to do it in the client, and no one cares to do it.

if you have to do it in the client, aka the application, then it's not transparent to the application

It's not transparent on Wayland or Windows (no idea about mac) either if you want actually properly drawn stuff.

Well, ok, on Windows if you keep to certain standard elements of Windows API and only use standard widgets you could get close to transparency.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#197

Post by trinix912 »

kccqzy wrote: post #8
pedrocr wrote: post #4

That's probably better than most scaling done on Wayland today because it's doing the rendering directly at the target resolution instead of doing the "draw at 2x scale and then scale down" dance that was popularized by OSX and copied by Linux. If you do it that way you both lose performance and get blurry output. The only corner case a compositor needs to cover is when a client is straddling two outputs. And even in…

> doing the "draw at 2x scale and then scale down" dance that was popularized by OSX Originally OS X defaulted to drawing at 2x scale without any scaling down because the hardware was designed to have the right number of pixels for 2x scale. The earliest retina MacBook Pro in 2012 for example was 2x in both width and height of the earlier non-retina MacBook Pro. Eventually I guess the cost of the hardware made this t…

Out of curiosity, do you happen to know why Apple thought that would be the cause for low adoption among 3rd party apps? Isn't scaling something that the OS should handle, that should be completely transparent, something that 3rd party devs can forget exists at all? Was it just that their particular implementation required apps to handle things manually?

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#198

Post by trinix912 »

wmf wrote: post #28
lostmsu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Wayland trying to monkey patch something that's broken elsewhere?

Do you want to be right or do you want to display apps.

That is right, but if the whole point of Wayland is to fix what X can't, then why not do it right from the start? Things would break anyways. Otherwise it's not really fixing all glaring issues X has.

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#199

Post by jcelerier »

kccqzy wrote: post #117
enriquto wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The scale factor can be something quirky like your 1.785, and the GUI code will generally make sure that things nevertheless snap to the pixel grid to avoid blurry results This is horrifying! It implies that, for some scaling factors, the lines of text of your terminal will be of different height. Not that the alternative (pretend that characters can be placed at arbitrary sub-pixel positions) is any less horrifyin…

> The bitter truth is that fractional scaling is impossible . That's overly prescriptive in terms of what users want. In my experience users who are used to macOS don't mind slightly blurred text. And users who are traditionalists and perhaps Windows users prefer crisper text at the expense of some height mismatches. It's all very subjective.

> In my experience users who are used to macOS don't mind slightly blurred text.

It always makes me laugh when apple users say "oh it's become of the great text rendering!"

The last time text rendering was any good on MacOS was on MacOS 9, since then it's been a blurry mess.

That said, googling for "MacOS blurry text" yields pages and pages and pages of people complaining so I am not sure it is that subjective, simply that some people don't even know how good-looking text can look even on a large 1080p monitor

Re: Ancient X11 scaling technology

#200

Post by DrinkyBird »

kiwijamo wrote: post #147
rwmj wrote: post #46

It's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.

I used to see it all the time on X11. I'd see it on YouTube/Firefox. I'd see it on VLC. I'd see it on MPV. Any video player, playing any fast paced video you'll see X11 struggle to keep up with drawing full frames that it'd just give up and draw half of one frame and another half of another frame and call it a day. The Intel driver luckily had an xorg.conf setting I could add to make this less of an issue -- I guess…

> It just works without any faffing around as Windows, MacOS, etc has done since the mid 1990's.

Unless you like your applications to save your window positions. I like Firefox to be on my left monitor, and if I use Wayland I have to manually drag it there every time I start it, because Wayland, in the year 2025, still lacks this basic feature that Windows, macOS, and X11 have had for like 40 years now.

(unless I use XWayland, which magically returns all of the missing functionality, though with a tendency to break other things)

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