Archive for January, 2015

WebGL on a high-DPI display

Dealing with WebGL on a high-DPI display isn’t too difficult, but it does require an understanding of device pixels vs CSS pixels. Elements on a page automatically upscale on a high-DPI display, as dimensions are typically defined with CSS, and therefore defined in units of CSS pixels. The <canvas> element is no exception. However, upscaling a DOM element doesn’t mean that the content within the element will be upscaled or rendered nicely – this is why non-vector content can appear blurry on higher resolutions. With WebGL content, not only will it appear blurry, but the viewport will likely be clipped as well, due to the viewport being incorrectly calculated using CSS pixel dimensions.

With WebGL everything is assumed to be in units of device pixels and there is no automatic conversion from CSS pixels to device pixels. To specify the device pixel dimensions of the <canvas>, we need to set the width and height attributes of the element:

CSS Pixels vs Device Pixels on canvas

I like to compute and set the attributes automatically using window.devicePixelRatio.
In glfx I do the following (passing in _canvasWidthCSSPx, _canvasHeightCSSPx):

// Get devicePixelRatio
glfx.devicePixelRatio = window.devicePixelRatio || 1;

// Set the width,height attributes of the canvas element (in device pixels)
var _canvasWidthDevicePx = _canvasWidthCSSPx * glfx.devicePixelRatio;
var _canvasHeightDevicePx = _canvasHeightCSSPx * glfx.devicePixelRatio;    
_canvas.setAttribute(
"width", _canvasWidthDevicePx);
_canvas.setAttribute(
"height", _canvasHeightDevicePx);

// Set viewport width,height based on dimensions of canvas element        
glfx.gl.viewportWidth = _canvasWidthDevicePx;
glfx.gl.viewportHeight = _canvasHeightDevicePx;        

Reference: HandlingHighDPI