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!
I’m glad your post didn’t get downvoted into oblivion like mine did.
It’s not a dealbreaker by any means and I’m happy with my upgrade, but it absolutely is a drawback to OLED.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/182ibx7/steam_deck_oled_looks_great_but_im_reminded_of/
oh wow, sorry to hear that!
I wish i didn’t see it, like others. Don’t know if i have picky eyesight or everyone else doesn’t even know what to look for. Nevertheless happy to hear I’m not the only one that noticed this and I’m not taking crazy pills
Full disclosure, I didn’t downvote you for the content of your post but because the “no one said this, so I will even if I am downvoted to oblivion!” stuff is obnoxious.
i would have done the same
Thank you for sharing. I believe this is valuable post, bcs if this can be fixed by Valve on SW level, as other comments sugests, this needs to be talked about so they even care to improve this. Without criticism there cant be improvement. Glorify SD only without valid criticism (even i love SD btw) will not push the improvements where there needs to be.
Nuf said, I hope this will be improved, as other problems on 3.5 FW. For example since the update má Wi-Fi acting strangly when in Steam shop (disaconnecting periodicaly) but it is ok when downloading stuff, i suspecting some emergy saving feature which needs to be adjusted. And theres surly more issues to be solved.
curious to see this kinda shot on the BOE panel just to compare it to Samsung panel since might help explain why ppl are experiencing more Mura effects on samsung screens
Ohh, so the green/red(ish) colors I see around text on every OLED screen I own is because of this. I thought this is a persisting hallucination I got from taking too much LSD (since I’ve never really noticed it before)
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.
These are the kinds of problems that Valve can actually participate in improving. Having a huge company like Valve with Linux hardware is such a big deal. It creates an incentive for them to fix these things and improve Linux as a whole.
My understanding is the Deck getting HDR is the first functional implementation of HDR on Linux. Proton is another huge example. Phenomenal for the wider Linux community.
Just a small detail, in Linux, the OS doesn’t handle this kind of thing, for SteamOS this is probably handled by Wayland or KDE, can’t say for sure as I’m not actually very up to date on how much of the desktop management stuff was offloaded to Wayland.
When people say “OS” they do not mean “kernel”. Wayland, compositors and partially even toolkits are very much part of the OS.
They’re not. I have multiple Linux installations that have no Wayland installed and some don’t even have X installed. The OS which is usually called GNU/Linux is the Linux kernel plus a set of GNU tools that allows you to use the system. No Linux user who knows what they’re doing would call Wayland part of the OS.
If it’s SteamOS and im not talking to people very well versed, it’s part of the OS.
No Linux user who knows what they’re doing would call Wayland part of the OS.
Yes they would, if the context is about “is it hardware or software that handles subpixel rendering”. Nobody is talking about the details of whatever is going on in the software.
That Linux users want to be different to the rest of the world isn’t a counterpoint.
Pendatry like this won’t get you anywhere!
You’re talking about the OS
Wayland/X is very much part of the OS (unless you run headless). It is not part of the Linux Kernel for sure, but OP didn’t say that.
Nobody called the OS “Linux” or GNU/Linux. Nobody (who knows what they’re doing) calls their OS GNU/Linux. Usually they call it Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch Linux (+ version + edition if it matters) or SteamOS. Only people who try to look intelligent call their OS GNU/Linux. (or maybe if you did LFS…)
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.
I don’t think the Game mode UI even uses subpixels for font anti-aliasing? Kind of bad news because most games don’t either.
I don’t know for certain, but the fact that they are on a blue background might mitigate fringing slightly. To me, those characters are too good looking for having no AA
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.
You should file a bug as you seem to really know what you are talking about and it could really help the devs with research. Just saying this as open source contribution can come from anywhere including bug reports from knowledgeable users I wish any of my users knew anything at the level you seem to understand. It could help fix garbage text across all of Linux you never know but we can dream.
What model OLED do you have? The limited edition models have an OLED panel from BOE while the others have an OLED panel from Samsung. This has resulted in slight differences between those models.
While there are reports from some about dead pixels on the BOE panels and not on the Samsung panels, there seem to be reports of a greenish tint under certain conditions that I believe are from the Samsung panels.
Not sure if that’s related to this or if the BOE panel also suffers from the greenish tint, but it would be neat to see a close-up shot like this comparing the two OLED panels.
Mine is samsung. it does gave a greenish tint but it’s most likely unrelated to this, I’d think. That one doesn’t really bother me at all because it’s only noticeable when compared to the LCD colors, and I still prefer the more vibrant OLED ones. would be nice to have a BOE panel to compare and take another picture, yeah
I thought these were supposed to have RGB stripe subpixels?
Text does look bad on this. I assumed it was cause of the low res. Good to know.
I’ve played through a few games since getting the OLED and felt the exact opposite. As in it was noticeably better than the LCD variant. I’ll be on the lookout for this going forward.
While I haven’t done a direct comparison to the LCD since getting the OLED, I recall text on the LCD being horribad and one of the first things I noticed was not straining to read on the OLED.
IIRC I played these for at least an hour:
- jurassic park evo 2 (text heavy)
- disco elysium (text heavy)
- ghostwire tokyo
- katamari reroll
- olli olli world
I noticed this immediately when I unboxed mine. The same color fringing happens on every oled monitor and tv I’ve connected to my windows pc as well.
Does the Switch OLED have the same sub pixel issue?
I have this on my alienware OLED monitor. bothered me for a week. not anymore
This is very interesting because I thought it was a stripe but apparently not…
If you turn off anti-aliasing, the fringes will go away but then you won’t have “smooth” edges. You could also alternatively use greyscale AA instead of subpixel AA (which would be using the individual RGB subpixels).
for greyscale in the .fonts.conf file for “rgba” have it say “none” as the value instead of “rgb”.
This is what passes for stripe on OLED. The Switch layout is similar. It does have one R, G, B stripe per pixel, but you can see that they aren’t laid out in a simple, equal way like on LCDs.
I always hear people whine about this on OLED’s.
I have a 49” G9 OLED in front of me. Text looks absolutely fine.
So much blue, and so little red.