On Thursday 08 April 2004 15:11, Jim Wilson wrote: > You know with the huge vid memories and fast GPUs now, and the fact that > LCD's are fixed resolution anyway, it won't be too many more years before > mode switching will be a thing of the past!
The problem with LCDs is, that their physical resolution is too low to allow a nice picture qualitiy at low or non native resolutions. The picture qualitiy is in this case bad, because of rounding errors when switching from a native to a low none native resolution. For example: If the native mode is 1280*1024 and you want to run 800*600, then this means that 1.6 pixels must simulate the 800 pixels in the witdh and 1.70666 pixels the high. 1.6 pixels is not a high value and it is not an integer value, you will have rounding errors. But now let's assume we have a LCD monitor with a very high native resolution of 3200*2400 then this allows the following resolutions nearly negligible or no rounding errors: 800*600 -> 1/4 of the native resolution -> whole integer numbers! 1600*1200 -> /1/2 of the native resolution -> whole integer numbers! 640*480 -> 1/5 of the native resolution -> whole integer numbers! So 3 none native modes on such a display that look perfect because you don't have rounding errors. Even none native modes that can't be displayed correctly look better because you have a lot more pixels available to compensate the rounding errors. For example for a mode like 1024*768 we have 3.125 pixels to compensate this 0.125 rounding error instead of only 1-2 pixels on todays LCD monitors. An we also should not forget the physical resolution grid is also a lot finer, so we won't notice rounding errors. The conclusion is, in future we still need and can use mode switching because the LCD monitors will have a higher resolution that can easily compensate rounding errors in none native modes. And the faster GPUs don't solve the problem of mode switching, because the new games do run slow on your 1.5 year old GPU so you will still need to run a lower resolution to get enough frames with your old GPU. This means you still need mode switching in future. Best Regards, Oliver C. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
