anyway I saw a youtube video about "wow we put a higher res screen in the steam deck it's so cool" and I'm amazed that people are capable of missing the point by such a margin
the thing i am incredibly not normal about (okay, one of them) is that the increase in screen resolutions everywhere is ruining everything
i swear to god sure it's pretty but a tiny screen does not need to be pumping out more than 720p this is obscene why are phones 4K that is Entirely too much processing for a screen the size of a... well, tablet now, but still much smaller than that resolution will Ever need
Plum is a card carrying member of "Display pixel density has gone too far". We pushed display technology so far that we had to come up with entirely new sets of software to get graphical screen elements to render larger because otherwise they'd be so small you couldn't read them. It's a massive increase to the amount of data being asked to be output from the computer (the pixels) and we're honestly at the point where that extra output has no real functional gains, IMO.
I'm not gonna like, razz someone for having a 4K TV (good luck finding a high quality 1080p set), but I think displays are the single best example of marketing and unwitting customers chasing big number above all else. It's probably the most egregious in context of gaming, where the resolution increase very directly impacts the amount of compute that needs to be thrown at the task, in a situation where it's already compute limited, and ultimately just encourages people to buy obnoxiously high power draw GPUs just to render a game that could probably deliver the same level of enjoyment on a device that draws >25w with the right, primarily graphical, tweaks.
"But why do you care about power draw" just think about, using 400 watts of electricity to play a video game. Yes that's on the very very high end of what would ever be drawn in the real world by a total system but, think about that. For a game.
Of course I think 4K TVs are generally a waste of pixel density, 4k 24"-27" PC displays are literally just extra hassle, and 1080p smartphones only make sense because you're laying in bed right now with the thing 6 inches from your face reading this post1 and the entire OS is already built around scaling every graphical element up to work on it. It's all just wasted electricity at the end of the day, but good luck putting that cat back into the bag. And again, the native resolution begats media at that size. All the extra compute and data to prepare and deliver 1080p video to a phone instead of 720p, the MASSIVE file size differences and hilariously compute heavy codecs involved in youtube or netflix's backend to deliver 4K video. Hell, you ever remember getting a higher res monitor and all of your favorite furry art doesn't take up the whole screen anymore without looking weird? It just causes more problems all the way up the chain.
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sorry