Plasma 5.23 Picking Up Latest Breeze Evolution Style, SDDM Lands Native Wayland Support

[bple2137]

The reality here is we are moving away from setting screen res. Wine for wayland work or items like gamescope https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope you need to look at.

Both allow you to say to application they have low resolution screen but the GPU upscale to the monitors current resolution. The result of these in future for majority of users you will set the monitor to one of EDID listed resolutions and use that for everything. There are lot of issues people have run into changing resolution for one application then return back to the desktop and the resolution be wrong. Think this scale route means you can tab out of a full screen application using a lower resolution back to the desktop without needing to change the resolution of the monitor.

That's right. I found that even better in some cases. I've got 4K screen that handles only native resolution, 1080p and basically nothing else. Also setting resolution to 1080p looks pretty ugly on the screen for some reason. Thanks to how Wayland handles virtual screen res by upscaling is pretty useful in situations when e.g. games run just fine on 2K and it's impossible to run it on 4K, but 2K looks better than 1080p. Switching out from the app and back is now very convenient, too!

Though it introduces new problems. When GPU is very busy rendering the game, frame presentation may choke and there's stuttering - at least that's what it looks like. Also it feels like there's at least some performance penalty to it. I wonder if it's better on more powerful GPUs - the overhead might be as little as it won't make any noticeable difference in long run, at least that's what I wish

[oiaohm]

Though it introduces new problems. When GPU is very busy rendering the game, frame presentation may choke and there's stuttering - at least that's what it looks like. Also it feels like there's at least some performance penalty to it. I wonder if it's better on more powerful GPUs - the overhead might be as little as it won't make any noticeable difference in long run, at least that's what I wish

This will get less of a problem over time FidelityFX Super Resolution and other things like it coming mainstream usage. Yes there is going to be a little bit of GPU overhead but the required allocation of GPU time to upscale is very predictable. The issue of how to correctly allocate gpu time for scaler vs application to be fully worked out.

Something here to remember a monitor built in upscale solution has to be generic the result is generic can look absolutely horrible. Where things like gamescope, DLSS and FidelityFX Super Resolution can be doing custom upscale to match the application as well. This can be custom smoothing and so on to hide the upscale.

There is another problem here as well that explains the ugly and the limitation.
4K is 3840 x 2160 pixels 2k 2048 × 1080pixel. 1080P is 1920 x 1080
1080P on 4K= 3840/1920 2 pixel 2160/1080= 2 pixel
2K on 4K= 3840/2048 1.857pixel 2160/1080= 2 pixel

Notice 1080P to 4K is easy that instead of turning on 1 pixel you just turn on 4 this results in a very simple scaler to implement because there is no blending required. The 2k to 4k the 1.857 pixel results in some blending pixel to pixel as in smoothing so the edge is not as sharp. So you will be on the receiving end of the same effect as sub-pixel rendering with fonts.

The reality here built in monitor scalers will avoid blending if they can. Yes the reason why at times 720 signal on a 1080p monitor upscaled by the monitor can look better to the human eye than the 1080p signal of the same content is the fact 720 is also 1.5pixelx1.5 pixel so the monitor is doing some blending/bluring.

So there are going to be more and more monitors that only have 8k, 4k and 1080p with nothing else as this makes the in monitor scaler simple as a pure just turn on more pixels no blending required this also will result in sharp edges on the rendered output. Extra modes are going to require hardware scaler box or software scaling.

The day of being able to throw almost any custom mode at a monitor and have the scaler in the monitor solve it for you is coming to the end.

[doomie]

.... Wine for wayland work or items like gamescope ...

:P yknow you're one of those guys that makes forums and comments sections better places to be. i haven't looked into what wine is doing for wayland though, as it sounded very new/immature. ty!

... The day of being able to throw almost any custom mode at a monitor and have the scaler in the monitor solve it for you is coming to the end.

yeah naw, monitor scaling has usually been ugly, and always introduced latency in my experience... back on windows there was a switch to turn on "gpu scaling" to keep your monitor from doing it, with far superior results. VSR similar, only in reverse; but still no noticeable latency increase from native.

That's right. I found that even better in some cases. I've got 4K screen that handles only native resolution, 1080p and basically nothing else. Also setting resolution to 1080p looks pretty ugly on the screen for some reason. Thanks to how Wayland handles virtual screen res by upscaling is pretty useful in situations when e.g. games run just fine on 2K and it's impossible to run it on 4K, but 2K looks better than 1080p. Switching out from the app and back is now very convenient, too!

Though it introduces new problems. When GPU is very busy rendering the game, frame presentation may choke and there's stuttering - at least that's what it looks like. Also it feels like there's at least some performance penalty to it. I wonder if it's better on more powerful GPUs - the overhead might be as little as it won't make any noticeable difference in long run, at least that's what I wish

yeah i've had kinda dodgy experience with gamescope scaling for some reason (on an RX 5700, if that counts as more powerful). maybe it was my multiple monitor setup, but it sounded similar to what you're talking about. what i think is currently VSR enabled on my AMD card under X11 never seemed to have any latency or timing issues though... feels native.

downscaling under wayland sounds nice too, in theory, so long as you can still get sub-pixel cursor precision. come to think of it i haven't looked into drawing tablets under wayland again recently anyway, so maybe i'm just stuck on X for a while. that is, it's nice for both gaming and drawing, and it has become hard for me to live without

[oiaohm]

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:P yknow you're one of those guys that makes forums and comments sections better places to be. i haven't looked into what wine is doing for wayland though, as it sounded very new/immature. ty!

The wine one is still immature it has not made it into wine staging but it does have early approval to enter staging branch when more complete. https://github.com/varmd/wine-wayland Yes there are still major bug bares like opengl not working yet.

yeah naw, monitor scaling has usually been ugly, and always introduced latency in my experience... back on windows there was a switch to turn on "gpu scaling" to keep your monitor from doing it, with far superior results. VSR similar, only in reverse; but still no noticeable latency increase from native.

Yes due to windows now doing the gpu scaling switch and dlss and other things there is reducing reason for monitors to include a complex scaler. Yes monitor scaling introducing latency this is many factors some is in fact heat limits people don't want monitors with fans to cool the scaler.

Yes Nvidia releasing the tools to measure end to end latency this also will make monitor makers look to scaling that requires the least processing and that is integer scaling. interger scaling so 1K, 4K and 8k can all integer scale to each other. I do suspect non integer scaling in monitor is going to end up the domain of TV only.

Something that is really simple to overlook when you are doing non integer scaling like 1.8 or 1.5 that a pixel goes into why doing it on the GPU can appear to have way less latency is simple the output frame is ready with more time until display so gpu has more time to run more processing to get better result on output than the monitor does and the gpu has active cooling.

yeah i've had kinda dodgy experience with gamescope scaling for some reason (on an RX 5700, if that counts as more powerful). maybe it was my multiple monitor setup, but it sounded similar to what you're talking about. what i think is currently VSR enabled on my AMD card under X11 never seemed to have any latency or timing issues though... feels native.

This is more working on the finer details to get the scaling not to be a performance problem. Yes VSR enabled does really show you how good GPU scaling can be. That there does not have to be latency or timing issues if the gpu scaling is working perfectly.

downscaling under wayland sounds nice too, in theory, so long as you can still get sub-pixel cursor precision. come to think of it i haven't looked into drawing tablets under wayland again recently anyway, so maybe i'm just stuck on X for a while. that is, it's nice for both gaming and drawing, and it has become hard for me to live without

Yes this downscaling is why I think changing resolution will go away for the majority of cases. It will change to being able to set scaling factor per application effectively.

Setting EDID is going to come only need doing when monitor for some reason is providing incorrect EDID information. Custom resolution modes most people set when you do the maths are not integer scaling so as monitor start restricting to only having integer scaler as well the those modes in monitor hardware are not going to work any more.

The time of setting custom resolution in my eyes is coming to the end. Most of what was done by setting custom resolution in the past will in future have to be done by gpu scaling.

I also do suspect in future we will also need to be doing colour space conversion in the GPU as well. As we get monitors that are 10 bit per channel only or equal. This way those monitors always will benchmark as low latency because they will not be colour space conversion inside them basically the same kind of latency saving as not doing non integer scaling. Basically as we going forwards here the functionality a monitor provides will reduce with the GPU being made pick up the slack making in future custom resolution option for the majority of cases pointless with the non pointless options being per application scaling and colour space conversion by gpu.

[skierpage]

on update to Plasma 5.22 it shows me the default wallpaper, even if I can go in the settings files and see my old wallpaper is still listed in there.

Sounds like bug 427861. Comments suggest the file to back up is ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc , mine has lots of"containments" even though I have a simple setup.

All things considered, I'm happy with KDE on X and I've come to consider Michael's "this new KDE version features vastly improved Wayland support" as sarcasm or twisting the knife in the wound.

Fedora 35's KDE spin defaults to Wayland, it's working pretty well for me and 5.22 sounds better still.