Bug 120583 – Hardware-accelerated rendering fails to round to whole pixels

• Status: NEW
• Component: Layout and Rendering

[Daniel Fischer]

Created attachment 210250 [details]
Test case 1: translate3d

When using something that triggers hardware acceleration, such as translate3d or transitions, translating by a non-whole number of pixels makes the contents blurry.

I've attached a test case and screenshots of how it renders in the latest WebKit and Firefox nightlies. Try it on a non-retina display, as retina displays will show the translations by "half pixels" correctly.

[Daniel Fischer]

Created attachment 210251 [details]
Result on Safari with latest WebKit nightly

[Daniel Fischer]

Created attachment 210252 [details]
Result on latest Firefox/Gecko nightly

[Zan Dobersek]

CC-ing a couple of people to whom this might be of interest.
Also confirming.

[Simon Fraser (smfr)]

This is just a side-effect of the underlying framework used to render 3D transforms on Mac. Not much we can do about it.

[Daniel Fischer]

Created attachment 210392 [details]
Result on Chrome 29 on Windows

Are you sure about that Mac thing?

[Daniel Fischer]

Created attachment 210395 [details]
Test case 2: transition

Also, another test case here. While transitioning, the second line is blurry, while the first one isn't.

[Simon Fraser (smfr)]

This is the difference in rendering between asking the underling text subsystem to render at fractional pixel offsets, and rendering at a pixel boundary into a texture, then compositing that texture at a fractional-pixel offset.

[Daniel Fischer]

How does Gecko get this right? Just from looking at the result, it seems to me like they just round beforehand. Didn't dig into the code though.

[Daniel Fischer]

Still present in latest nightly on OS X. Probably on other platforms too.

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

If it is a non rotating or 3d transform, the content can be rounded to whole pixels and the subpixel part put in the subpixel accumulation. That is what we do for accelerated composited layers with subpixel precision position.

[Bao Thien Ngo]

I'm attaching a Test case 3 which is a simple 2D translate but includes an iframe to a Vimeo video, however the symptom appears in a very specific case.

I have a Macbook Pro with Retina display and an attached Thunderbolt Display. When I view the page on my Macbook Pro's LCD screen, it actually looks fine and crisp. However, when I view it on the Thunderbolt Display, it shows up blurry.

I've attached an image comparison of the test page when you load it without the iframe vs when you load it with the iframe; both involve translate() of the DIV element.

If Simon Fraser is correct and this is a subsystem issue of Mac OS X, then I can only theorize that that framework is not correctly handling externally attached monitors. But what about the mere act of adding the iframe to the DIV container?

[Bao Thien Ngo]

Created attachment 245483 [details]
Test case 3 - Video iframe inside a translate() DIV

[Bao Thien Ngo]

Created attachment 245484 [details]
Result of Test case 3 on latest Webkit Nightly (OSX)

Comparing the loading of the page first without the video iframe, and then with the video iframe.