Colloquially, “high DPI” has a fairly specific meaning: it means “designed to be used with a scaling factor of at least 2 (and definitely uncomfortable to use below a scaling factor of 1.5)”. 1920×1080 on 14″ does not meet this definition.
And when it’s capitalised, High DPI, as it was in the parent comment, it’s definitely referring to this definition.
Back in the days when 1366×768 and 1280×800 were common sorts of resolutions and 1920×1080 was the highest available (that is, before Apple’s Retina displays), perhaps you could have said 1920×1080 was “high DPI”, but people didn’t use the term “high DPI” back then. And certainly not “High DPI”.
I understand it is good for programming. Can it handle video editing? I am trying to decide between T14 and P1, which is almost twice the price as T14.
Do you need more performance benchmarks? Here's my experiences on Linux (NixOS).
I've done some light Blender work on it and it handled things just fine. Haven't tried GPU acceleration for Cycles, though.
If I bump up thermal limits to 95 degrees then it compiles things at similar speeds to my old i7-6700k machine, if not slightly faster. At stock 60 degrees it's still pretty damn fast, but aggressively throttles if you try to use all cores at once for more than a few seconds. At stock thermal limits it also never gets too uncomfortable to handle.
The GPU is good but not great. Satisfactory via Proton struggled (but got to 50FPS on low settings), older games like Portal 2 run great on ultra settings. amdgpu works pretty well, or at least not worse than amdgpu on my desktop.
Overall, it's a good replacement for my old workstation, can handle some non-trivial video/GPU workloads, and I recommend it. There's some things that need to be ironed out (ACPI S3 sleep is currently somewhat broken, but Lenovo is currently working on certifying this machine with Ubuntu, so that should fix things), but that's mostly because it's such a new CPU/Laptop.
Thank you. I really want a AMD laptop, but they don't seem to have good displays. If I am to stare at the screen 10+ hours a day, I'd like a good screen.
My last couple of laptops have had IPS panels. I intend never to buy a TN panel again.
My last laptop was a 15″ 1920×1080, and my current is a 13″ 3000×2000 (and I love the aspect ratio). I intend never to buy a laptop with a 1920×1080 screen again.
At some point I’m afraid I may end up with a ≥120fps screen and rarefy my tastes still further. (I hear good things about them, but have never seen an LCD with such a frame rate.) Fortunately screens with both a high frame rate and a high resolution are still vanishingly rare.
I just hope someone comes out with a good screen on one of these—I barely even care if it’s super expensive; because it’d be a real shame to have to decide between a good screen and a good CPU.
For desktop use 120 vs 60 Hz is noticeable on Windows (obviously very noticeable on the mouse cursor, but that doesn't change the UX much), but because DWM has basically optimal latency as far as dragging windows around goes, it's not that big of a difference. On Linux it's a pretty huge difference since Linux compositors aren't as good as DWM. Basically, Linux with 120 Hz feels like Windows on 60 Hz.
First thing I usually switch off on Linux is the compositor. It's not that bad typically (you notice latency only if you look for it), but why add unnecessary latency...
I loved wobbly windows in Ubuntu a decade ago, on my first laptop. Switched to i3 in Arch Linux with no compositor on my second laptop. I think wobbly windows was the only thing I missed from Compiz.
> screens with both a high frame rate and a high resolution are still vanishingly rare
They're huge power sinks. If you need to play games on the laptop for some reasons and can have it plugged in all the time, it works. But 4k often take 1-2h off the battery life and the high frame rate will likely have an impact too.
I don't mind 1080p, or 60hz, but I'd love proper HDR OLED for work, so I can have high contrast together with lower brightness.
Remember when 99% of laptops priced around $800 or lower were automatically doomed with a 1024x768 screen - and to get a higher resolution you'd be paying at least 300-400 more?
Things were like that when I wanted to get my previous laptop in 2014 or so; you want 1366×768? Great! We have laptops from AU$400 onwards. You want 1920×1080? Here, enjoy our tiny range of AU$1,500+ laptops, all of which are heavy and power-hungry with dedicated graphics cards because you must want that, right? I mean, why else would you want a decent screen?
It’s not quite so strong these days with 1920×1080 or even with 4K panels, but the segmentation is still definitely real. The feature segmentation, things like pairing dedicated graphics with better screens (even when the screens could easily be driven by dedicated graphics), is particularly distressing, because they’re making you pay more for things that you either don’t care for or actively don’t want, just to get other things you do want.
> I intend never to buy a laptop with a 1920×1080 screen again
Same here and WOW, it's frustrating. There are so many laptops that would be amazing if it wasn't for their screens. Paradoxically 17" models are almost all crap.
Ugh, also those times when >99% of 15″ models were 1366×768 or similar, while 11″ ultrabooks were happily shipping 1920×1080 or even higher. Fortunately that’s almost behind us now.
I bought recently HP 455 G7 with Ryzen 4300U and IPS screen. It's not the best screen but miles better than TN-film panels anyway. Good for a budget office laptop.
I ordered the 445 G7 with 4750U over a month ago. Shortly after, I was notified the estimated delivery was pushed out to a specific date a couple weeks later than original.
A couple weeks later, I got notified that that due to supply issues for certain components, the date was pushed, without a specific date, and I could cancel if I wanted or take a discount when it finally shipped.
This week HP said they cancelled my order altogether, with a list of cancelled business laptop skus. All of them were because of lack of AMD CPUs.
Supposedly I can get a discount on something else, but there's just not much to pick from.
It's a tad ironic (to me) because unless you max out the scaling of the display, none of the MacBook displays have an effective resolution >= 1920x1080. Apple has been defaulting to a fractional scaling the past few years rather than true Retina which is 200% scaling, but even then it falls short[0].
However, 200% scaling is crisp and I can appreciate it. I just don't like losing all that real estate. And the fractional options on MacBooks aren't bad, but I can see text fuzzing out when it's not on the real Retina resolution. So when I'm running without an external display I do bite the bullet and deal with the lower resolution because otherwise I can feel my eyes straining.
I’ve heard that macOS fractional scaling seriously is rendering at one size, and then upscaling or downscaling it to the target size. I’m not certain this is true because I haven’t confirmed it myself and it seems such an obviously stupid idea (and though it’s certainly easier, no one else does it that way because it’s such a terrible idea), but I’ve heard people saying this at least three times (twice on the internet, once in real life), about text not being crisp at fractional scaling. I dunno.
It is always rendering at integer scale and always downscaling to target size (upscaling would result in blurriness; upscaled apps are only those that support only @1X scale).
Just take a screenshot of your desktop and check it's resolution, then compare to physical display resolution. Apple uses output scaler of the final, composited image.
It's not stupid; it is a solution that you can implement without support at application side and is relatively simple. Going Android way means, that all apps have to support random scales, which means they have to ship with assets for that.
Both upscaling and downscaling result in blurriness, though upscaling will generally yield slightly worse results. But downscaling is still going to yield a result drastically inferior to rendering at the correct size. It totally butchers pixel-perfect lines, for example. It’s the sort of hack that would be awful on low-resolution displays, and only becomes even vaguely tolerable on high-resolution displays because it’s still somewhat better than a low-resolution display for a lot of what people are using their computers for, even if for others it renders it legitimately unusable.
If this really is true, I remain utterly baffled, and I maintain my position that it is an obviously stupid idea. Doing it that way just makes no sense to me. The visual result is way worse, it’s more resource-demanding and thus slows things down a little, and it doesn’t really simplify anything for app developers anyway—the only difference is that you have an integer scaling factor rather than a float scaling factor; but all code is still having to perform scaling mappings, and using floats would change roughly nothing (though the changes required in your APIs may need to propagate through a few levels, and GUI libraries will have to decide how to handle subpixel alignment). Windows and Android have both done it properly, so that supporting fractional scaling is no burden whatsoever for developers. You talk of having to ship assets for arbitrary scales, but that’s not a reasonable argument: GUI libraries should always choose the most suitable version of a resource, and scale it to the desired size themselves if it doesn’t match exactly.
The result of taking the proper approach is that users of fractional scaling may get icons being rendered poorly, but images, text, vector graphics, &c. will be rendered precisely and crisply. Meanwhile, this other behaviour people are saying Apple is doing is just guaranteeing that everything is rendered poorly. Surely they’re not actually doing this? Is it perhaps a case of them having erred in making Retina support integral scaling only, but they’ve since made a better version that supports fractional scaling that each app can opt into, but they just haven’t insisted on everyone fixing their stuff yet? (And remember, Apple’s in an excellent position to do such insisting—they do it regularly.) —But as you say, screenshots are scaled at the next integer, which would suggest that yeah, they’re actually doing this mangling system-wide, and there’s no per-app recourse. Thanks for that explanation.
I just find it hard to believe that Apple would truly butcher things this badly. Even if they’ve been known to do weird things a bit like this before, like killing off their text subpixel rendering with no stated justification, to the clear detriment of low-DPI users (and it may still be worthwhile even for high-DPI users).
I can’t check any of this because I don’t use a Mac. There may even not be a macOS device within a kilometre or two of me.
I have both a 15" MacBook Pro (2018 model) and a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 open in front of me right now. I have 20/20 vision and it really is not striking me as that much better. I spend quite a bit of my day in a terminal and the remainder looking at the web, so font rendering definitely matters. Even with Linux's abysmal font-rendering, the mac really doesn't feel like it has the edge.
Wait, what? It's somewhere in the middle between Windows (too pixel-fitted) and macOS (too blurry). FreeType, slight hinting, LCD filtering on is the best font rendering that I know.
20/20 vision is only average for the population when you get to 60. So most people here will see significantly better than that. At 20/20 1080p is probably enough. Most people will enjoy a 1440p screen and 2160p will have marginal gains but it may be helpful to be able to use 2x scaling instead of needing fractional steps. But that depends on how you drive it.
Font rendering was matter on Low-DPI monitors but IMO not much matter for HiDPI monitors because some techniques like anti-aliasing is no more needed. Fonts are still important.
Hmmm, as an engineer, I have my vision checked every year. While a difference is discernible, it's not enough that I'd "miss it" if I didn't have a retina display. (I just ordered a Dell XPS 15 this weekend, I purposely left if at FHD as I didn't see the need for 4K on a laptop)
I'm on a three-year-old MBP right now. Next to me is my new IdeaPad Slim 7. Other than Slim's screen being a bit smaller, I hardly notice a difference.
I would have ordered an AMD Lenovo T14s if they hadn't artificially segmented it by not offering the 4K screen available on the Intel version. Hopefully AMD can increase the volume for these chips and more configurations show up.