QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)

Ken Young rtm at cfa.harvard.edu
Mon Jun 9 15:09:15 CEST 2008


Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:

> i know:
>
> 1. u may need to scroll more
> 2. viewing of images/data that just have more pixel content will need to
> be zoomed out and have less display fidelity
> 3. some things requiring text displays like 80x24 terminals will be not
> readable at all at font sizes able to fit on the display (they will jut
> blur away all character details).
>
> with almost everything i can think of you can get by qvga by:
>
> 1. scaling data
> 2. changing font sizes
> 3. re-arranging ui elements etc.
>
> no matter what you need to do this even for vga - if coming fro xga land
> or better. it's just a more extreme case.

If you are going to demand an example of an application which simply
cannot be run on a QVGA screen, no matter how bad the user experience
would be, then I guess people will have a hard time coming up with one.
The same would be true of a 100 x 100 pixel screen.   You could just
scroll and scroll and scroll some more, and do what you need to do.
You could just demand that everyone re-write their applications to
accomodate a screen that is very small.   We could all switch to reading
text in Braille, whose characters can be displayed in a smaller
cell than the fonts sighted persons usually use.

But the question should not be "Can you give me an example of something
which can be done with a VGA screen but which absolutely cannot be done
with a QVGA screen?".   The question should be "Are you willing to
give up the benefits of a VGA screen in order to have smooth animation
and fast video on a QVGA screen, and a lower cost?".   It seems to me
that the vast majority of the people who have reponded here have said no,
that's a poor engineering trade off.   In fact, I don't think even one
person has responded that, for them, that trade off would be a good one.

Ken Young





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