Rohit (@.) on 10/2/10 wrote:
>
>May be increasing the ppi (a la iphone 4) will help?

I'd love to see more high-resolution displays, and it
is going to drive some graphics performance work
in the future, but it won't necessarily really do much.

For example, say that you currently run at 1920x1080 or
something, and move up to 2560x1440. You're doubling your
pixels. So add a second (or third) screen to drive things
up further still.

What happens? One thing that happened is that you're just
talking about a few years of graphics card performance
improvement. Think about it. And think about how quickly
people upgrade their monitors. End result: your resolution
isn't growing fast enough for it to matter.

The other thing that happens is that the quality of those
pixels don't need to be as good. Let's face it, even when
you run at 1920x1080, things like 4xAA and fancy filtering
don't matter hugely in moving pictures. There's a reason
why video is considered "HD" when you do it at 1280x720p,
but a still picture isn't considered high quality unless
it's in the ten megapixel range.

Yes, yes, graphics card vendors (and game review sites)
do the whole "compare screenshots" thing to see if you
can tell the difference between the quality of the
anisotropic filtering. But nobody actually tends to care
during any real gameplay.

The big deal about things like good AA/filtering is that
the human eye is actually good at seeing certain kinds of
pixel effects. Things like the "marching pixels" effect
when moving around a bit and you see creeping edges or when
you can see odd sampling effects from textures etc.

But at high resolutions and moving video, you don't need
to do expensive multi-sampling etc. You can choose to just
blur the picture, and give it a lower resolution. And no
human will ever tell the difference.

So as pixel counts go up, the opportunity for just faking
it goes up too. So while you might see an order of magnitude
more pixels on your screen some day, I doubt you'll need
even an order of magnitude more processing power to make
the picture look fine.

So no, extra resolution won't drive an infinite amount of
future graphics performance.

Other things will do it, of course. People still do want
more realistic effects etc. So I'm not saying "640kB of
memory is enough for anybody", I'm just saying that there
are lots of diminishing returns. I also guarantee that
noise from your computer is a real issue, very much during
gaming too. Not all games are all about loud explosions,
and not all of the experience is about how many pixels you
can push and how quickly.

Linus