over-resolution - why don't they use SSAA for UIs?

[VirtualLarry]

Just wondering, why don't ATI and NV video drivers support a double-resolution mode, that is then scaled down using SSAA to fit onto, says a 1366x768 laptop screen?

Sure, it would have a touch of blur to it, but it would give some netbooks and lower-res (consumer) laptops just THAT much more screen res to play with.

 

[Stuka87]

Well, probably has something to do with no OS's (Outside of OSX) having support for such a mode. All images have to be high resolution natively. In the case of OSX it has retina display support, so doing a super sample mode on a smaller non-retina display would be doable. But it would require a decent amount of hardware that cheap laptops with 768P displays never ever have.

Its better to just have a higher res screen.

 

[Ben90]

Set your browser zoom to 50%. Using AA designed to smooth common fonts might help a little bit. But it would be impossible to smooth every font into a readable state.

All video cards (even Intel IGP from over a decade ago) support using a higher resolution than the monitor is capable of, and "scrolling over" when the mouse reaches the edges.

 

[Pottuvoi]

Set your browser zoom to 50%. Using AA designed to smooth common fonts might help a little bit. But it would be impossible to smooth every font into a readable state.

This.
Font rendering is a very complex problem and just using SSAA doesn't necessarily make it better.

Windows has never been good with scaling in general and it still has huge amount of legacy options doesn't really help.
IMHO, they should have rewritten it to be completely realtime scalable years ago.

 

[BrightCandle]

I suspect you want this on the assumption it would make things look better. It wouldn't.

Fonts are already rendered in a sophisticated way. What looks like black/grey text is actually a complex picture of the different colours of the monitors pixels where they are used to produce a smoother image, otherwise known as sub pixel rendering. Its this knowledge of the display combined with a highly optimised and carefully controlled font design that makes the text as readable as it is. SSAA doesn't even come close.

We have this problem with images and fonts and lots of other things, and we have to create specially crafted pictures for different scenarios because the monitors don't have a good enough pixel density. We got into the custom approach because techniques like SSAA didn't work.

 

[Ben90]

Dang, I turned font smoothing back on because I was curious, and it actually helps a lot with the 50% test. Things are actually readable although not close to ideal.

I always go back and forth on if I actually want font smoothing on all the time. On one hand it looks cleaner, but it's not as crisp.

 

[bystander36]

Fonts already have a system to smooth them, similar to AA. ClearType is a feature in Windows that performs similar to AA.

Icons should already have any smoothing done to them by the creator of the icons, same with pictures.

 

[imagoon]

I would imagine that something like this would be far simpler to do in the video driver than natively in the OS. I bet the support could be written in by ATI and Nvidia if there was any real desire for it.

 

[boxleitnerb]

This already works with Nvidia. Just set up a custom resolution in the driver control panel.