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I don’t know about you, but I don’t have too many displays sitting around that go beyond 4K. My large screen on the desk sits between QHD and 4K at 3440×1440 and I have access to a few 4K displays, but I’ve never owned anything with more pixels than that. Be that as it may, there are quite a few 5K displays on the market at this point and it seems that up to this point, Chrome OS hasn’t really known what to do with them.
Again, I don’t have any of those screens, so I can’t directly attest to the issue. However, if this commit language is anything to go by, it seems Chrome OS hasn’t been fully equipped with the proper tools to handle anything more than the 3840×2160 that 4K leverages. In the language for this commit, some changes are being added that will allow Chrome OS to understand and work better on 4K+ screens:
CHROMIUM: drm/i915: Avoid using scalers for 5k resolutions
According to Ville, scalers don’t work when the resolution is wider than 4096.
TEST=Tested with hatch on Samsung CRG9 5k display. YouTube doesn’t flake out
In this test, it seems that this change to Chrome OS keeps YouTube from “flaking out” on a 5K display, so that would indicate that before the tweak, some things were simply not working once we scaled larger than 4K. While I don’t see this being necessary for Chromebooks and their internal screens any time soon, it is good to see things getting ironed out for higher resolution displays. For creators, video editors, billboards and kiosks, higher resolution screens are only going to become more commonplace as time goes on. While many of us may not need this feature in the near future, it is always nice to see Chrome OS adopt future-proof changes that could come in very handy down the road.
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