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I am really curious about the technology behind the 5k iMac. I am not sure if there is any off the shelf GPU out there that can drive that display using retina
by pptr1 12y ago
I am really curious about the technology behind the 5k iMac. I am not sure if there is any off the shelf GPU out there that can drive that display using retina type rendering.
It's interesting they did a custom controller for the display timing (Timing Controller (TCON)) . They must have had to do deep customizations to use the AMD R9 M290X (comparable to the Radeon HD 7870) to drive it.
If this is not innovative I am not sure what is, in terms of an engineering standpoint.
- slantyyz 12y agoCouldn't they do basically what is being done with current 4K monitors? I.e. treat the monitor like a dual screen using two connections?
- slg 12y agoMost 4k displays do that due to bandwidth restrictions of current display cables. There is unlikely to be any GPU benefit to treating it as two separate displays since you still have to push the same number of pixels.
- jacquesm 12y agoExcept of course that both outputs could come from their own separate GPU. Plenty of dual GPU cards.
- slg 12y agoThat was my first thought as well. I wonder if Apple has limited the refresh rate to something like 30hz or if they are banking on most apps simply using the downsized resolution instead of the full 5k. I can't imagine that card trying to play any modern game at anything close to that resolution for example.
- nknighthb 12y agoOf course not. You don't even run recent graphics-intensive games at full resolution on the highest-end MBP with 1/3rd the pixels. We're still some ways from any consumer system taking full advantage of retina displays for high-end gaming.
- jrockway 12y agoAre you sure about that? I have a 4K monitor and initially tested it with 3D games at full resolution and they played fine at 30Hz. I switched to an nVidia card and was able to play at 60Hz just fine. Going to 5K only about doubles the number of pixels, so it sounds like a solvable engineering problem. Panels are ready and GPUs are ready; the link layer is why you can't go to Best Buy and buy a 5k monitor. DisplayPort and HDMI both suck.
- kayoone 12y ago4K gaming is currently reserved to the most high end desktop GPUs if you want to play any recent/modern games. To get >60fps you'd need two in sli/crossfire. A M290X is not even close to that. But even on a 4K display you can easily play at 1080p because it scales down nicely, for 5K youd probably have to play at 1440p which is a bit much for the M290X
- jrockway 12y agoGood luck getting >60fps worth of 4k pixels over DisplayPort or HDMI. I will give my firstborn for an 8k* monitor with a 120Hz refresh rate. He or she will probably have kids when I get that, though. (4k is not that compelling. At 32" it's only 140ppi, which is nothing approaching "retina" levels.)
- objclxt 12y ago> (4k is not that compelling. At 32" it's only 140ppi, which is nothing approaching "retina" levels.) ...one would hope that you're not viewing the 32" 4K monitor at the same distance you would view your phone from. Comparing PPI of a 32" screen to a 6" one is rather meaningless as the viewing distance is going to be vastly different.
- leephillips 12y agoI suppose the custom hardware means there is little chance of getting this to run Linux any time soon?
- tracker1 12y agoNot sure, though I really don't mind OSX, and with homebrew, it's pretty close to a 1:1 for most of my use on OSX... The only thing that irks me a little is the muscle memory for using the option key for cut-copy-paste in the UI vs the actual ctrl key (ctrl-c etc) in a terminal...
- lanna 12y agoYou can easily remap it in System Preferences: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13742 http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13742
- tracker1 12y agoBut, then I'm pressing command+c in the terminal window.
- torarnv 12y agoYou want Karabiner https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
- qqz 12y agoKarabiner is amazing. I love that I can finally recommend it to people and they don't say "I have an iMac…"
- werdbomb 12y ago@leephillips - good news is that linux installs fairly painlessly on the iMac 5K. I'm running Fedora 20 and it's going really well. Some slight funkiness with sound but I'm sorting that out now. Need hardware accel for gnome shell so required this workaround for the ATI drivers: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1054435 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1054435
- moogleii 12y agoSo anyone know what the actual native res is?
- wmf 12y ago5120x2880
- at-fates-hands 12y agoSerious question here. At what point is the human eye unable to tell the difference between such high res displays? I'm thinking in the same terms I used to think when I was doing home audio. My boss had a set of $10K speakers. Sure, they sounded great, but then I listened to a clients $5k speakers and couldn't tell the difference between his and my bosses speakers. It was as if my ears weren't finely tuned enough to tell. Of course if you ask my Boss about the difference, he'd take an hour to tell all the differences. To me, the lay person at the time, I couldn't tell.
- skizm 12y agohttp://i.imgur.com/xiW4vdw.png http://i.imgur.com/xiW4vdw.png
- Rubix117 12y agoI agree. As weird as it sounds I wonder what rate the desktop refreshes at.
- revelation 12y agoWell, what is innovative is building an actual 5k display. Or the Intel processors at ever smaller size. But a shim interface to make one component work with another? Thats the business of millions of companies out there.
- tormeh 12y agoIt may not be innovative, but it's something good that makes Apple consistently leapfrog everyone else on everything else than raw processing power and value. I mean, who else would have done this? Dell? Nope. Apple is actually pretty awesome like this.
- Nevermark 12y agoExactly. Apple tries to do a lot of firsts when they release a new product category, but most of their updates are about putting the effort into the smallest details that matter to users, even if the users don't know about it. They are better than anyone else at that simply because nobody else really sees the whole product as their own problem. I.e. each hardware/software/service maker is just optimizing their part.
- sjwright 12y agoMy favorite example of this: a MacBook's headphone socket has full support for iPhone earbuds. The little headset microphone is used and the volume/pause buttons operate exactly as on an iPhone. Obvious in retrospect, but just another example of how Apple treats their product range as a complete ecosystem.
- delecti 12y agoI think the issue is less that only Apple is capable of making these technological leaps, and more that only Apple is capable of pushing them to a wider audience. Few companies can get away with such a relatively narrow selection of hardware products. Dell for example has dozens of laptop models. By only having a few models, Apple making a big change to one results in a big chunk of the overall market including that feature.
- boxcardavin 12y agoI'm most impressed that they can manufacture 15 million pixels on a single panel without a single dead pixel. They must be wasting/repurposing a ton of panel square footage when cutting.
- MagerValp 12y agoWould you actually notice a single dead subpixel though at that resolution?
- wlesieutre 12y agoWhen looking closely and displaying a solid color, probably. In practice, maybe not. Once you notice where a dead subpixel is though, your eye goes straight to it every time it's visible.
- simonh 12y agoThat's true on conventional panels, but the whole point of retina is that the pixels individually are smaller than the human eye can resolve. I'd be interested to see in practice. I suppose it depends how far your eye needs to be from the screen for it you count as retina in that way.
- nitrogen 12y agoThe inability to discern an individual pixel with the same color as its neighbors doesn't mean that the same pixel with a vastly different collor won't be seen. A single bright green pixel in a white window will still be visible, even if the edges of the pixel itself can't be seen otherwise.
- alwillis 12y agoThere are 14.7 million pixels on the iMac's screen. The definition of a retina display is you can't discern individual pixels at normal viewing distances, so unless you're sitting with your nose against the screen or are using a loupe, you won't be able to see a single dead pixel.
- rasz_pl 12y agowow, you swallowed a lot of bullshit marketing :( >did a custom controller for the display timing (Timing Controller (TCON)) Apple doesnt produce displays, they dont design TCONs - Tcon is a pcb sitting directly behind glass driving individual crystals, and is designed and manufactured by the same company making the display. Also every Tcon is custom, and build to drive particular type of screen. Yes, when Dan Rissio says "we manufactured this screen' he is LYING TO YOU. They bought whole thing from LG or Sharp. AMD doesnt support DP 1.3 yet, so only way for 5K resolution is bonding two 3K screens together, this is so innovative IBM did it 15 years ago in T220. > retina type rendering you mean scaling down? this is what GPUs do best, out of the box. Yes, this screen is amazing. But dont act like its something revolutionary touched by Noodly Appendage.
- WoodenChair 12y agoApple has had its own display engineers since the '80s. Yes, they use several off the shelf components, but they're also known to create their own chips and oversee specialized manufacturing for particular models/challenges. Case in point was the 21" Apple CRT from the late '90s that featured a Sony Trinitron but also had custom Apple chips that auto calibrated as the display aged based on Apple's ColorSync technology. This looks like a similar collaboration. You really think the largest company in the world (by market cap) doesn't actively collaborate with its source companies and do custom designs created by its internal engineers together with the supplier's engineers?
- jsz0 12y agoIt's very impressive Apple made the effort to do this now instead of waiting for 'off the shelf' parts but the technology behind this is probably nothing to write home about. The biggest limitation of display bandwidth is currently external HDMI/DP standards which are slowly ratified and adopted. For all-in-ones and laptops additional channels can be added and/or clocked higher for additional bandwidth. Apple's TCON is probably a fairly standard part souped up a bit for higher performance to handle the additional channels / clock speeds. I'd be surprised if they are doing anything fancier than this because the jump from 4K to 5K isn't big enough to require it. Close enough that the 'old/current technology' can be stretched. On the video card side as long as the 7870 has enough VRAM to store frames desktop 2D / light 3D compositing isn't that demanding. The trade off here is heavy 3D (modern gaming) at native 5K or even down to 4K is mostly not happening on this machine. Probably a good choice since 2560x1440 at 120Hz+ is a better choice for gaming than higher resolutions at 60Hz.
- H_L 12y agoThe jump from 3840x2160 to 5120x2880 is nearly 2x, in pixel count. That is not just a 'tweak existing technology' kind of jump. TCON's that can handle a single logical 4K display are just hitting the market, and Apple has one shipping today to handle 5K. A timing controller may be simple tech, but it's cool that they're so far ahead of the curve.
- jsz0 12y agoIt's a big jump in pixel count but a 2X increase in bandwidth can be brute forced / tweaked out of existing technology similar to DL DVI or DP MST. IMO that doesn't diminish it at all because lots of technical problems have somewhat obvious solutions but actually making it happen is still difficult and expensive. Even more so if you want to avoid making any ugly trade offs in the process.
- pjmlp 12y agoThe problem is that Apple eco-system tends to be quite limiting in what we can do for gaming in other systems. So I rather have the choice among powerful GPUs, with drivers kept up to date to the latest OpenGL versions (separately from OS versions), then having retina support.