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0 pointsgertop1y ago0 comments

For the most part, Windows doesn't achieve fractional/integer scaling by doing gpu-accelerated bitmap scaling.

On Windows and MacOS and iOS and Android the GUI toolkits are aware of the scaling factor and draw themselves appropriately. It has nothing to do with the compositor.

Some legacy apps on Windows are indeed scaled like you describe, resulting in a blurry mess like on Linux, but they are few and far between.

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Arainach1y ago

That's a fair point. I could also have said "certain very vocal parts of the Linux community have resisted every effort to move to modern UI toolkits".

DWM, Direct2D, Direct Composition, and the fact that major Windows UX frameworks use them does allow significant offloading of drawing to GPU instead of CPU, however.

erik_seaberg1y ago

What happens in the datacenter where you don't have a GPU but each user probably does?

Arainach1y ago

Remote Desktop Protocol supports those APIs natively and can work with locally accelerated surfaces (RDP is way, way better than VNC or other Linux remote access options, particularly over low bandwidth connections - it's generations better technology).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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Arainach1y ago

That's a fair point. I could also have said "certain very vocal parts of the Linux community have resisted every effort to move to modern UI toolkits".

DWM, Direct2D, Direct Composition, and the fact that major Windows UX frameworks use them does allow significant offloading of drawing to GPU instead of CPU, however.

erik_seaberg1y ago

What happens in the datacenter where you don't have a GPU but each user probably does?

Arainach1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse