I’m gonna get downvoted to oblivion for this…

I just got my new OLED and weirdly enough, upon booting it I saw something that I didn’t even think of till now. With the new OLED, the sub-pixel arrangement is slightly different than the LCD, and it’s causing white edge (specially on text) to have this green/magenta fringing. It’s extremely faint, and it’s not particular to the Steam Deck since I know of other OLED panels that have the same fringing. However I have heard zero mention of this and I have to say that although this matters close to nothing while playing videogames, it’s something I do see with subtitles.

With this out of the way, the screen looks amazing and I’m more than ready to sell and replace my LCD deck now. I hope the technology gets there where this isn’t an issue anymore!

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Steam Deck LCD

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Steam Deck OLED

  • NonEuclidianMeatloafBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    OLED subpixel layout causing chromatic fringing has been known for years, and needs to be fixed at the OS-level.

    It all has to do with how the OS handles anti-aliasing of text. With no AA, text looks blocky and unpleasant to look at, but effective AA makes it smooth and attractive. The process responsible for this AA treatment is called ClearType in Windows, and other OS’s have their own processes. However, it works best with the common LCD subpixel layout as seen above, and is calibrated for this structure. It looks strange on OLEDs. You will need a software fix to address it; maybe Valve will include something similar.

    • martijn208BEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      ugh, yes. as an owner of the Alienware AW3423DW i have to set the ClearType to monochrome. i really wish vesa would make a standard so that the os can either get this info from the monitor or it’s just done like a driver.

    • rkidoBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Valve can control settings for text anti-aliasing in Steam, Steam’s Game Mode UI, and in the KDE that it shows with SteamOS, but subtitles and other text in games typically aren’t drawn by the OS but directly by the game’s own renderer. I don’t know if it would be possible for something like Gamescope to apply some sort of “filter” to games to mitigate poor text rendering in games; such filter would have to apply to the whole screen and might cause strange artifacts elsewhere.