For over a year now Intel has been working on a new DRM sharpness property for making use of Lunar Lake’s new adaptive sharpening filter capabilities built into its display engine. This new sharpening filter with Lunar Lake and future SoCs can hep with sharpening blurred or upscaled content and over the past year has gone through several rounds of code review. The latest patches were sent out last week for this DRM sharpness property.
Sadly too late for the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle is this DRM sharpness property but Intel engineers continue to pursue this functionality for the mainline Linux kernel to enhance Linux desktop/laptop use. Part of what has led to this Lunar Lake adaptive sharpening filter taking so long for Linux is due to trying to standardize the sharpening property for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) so that it can be used by different hardware drivers in the future and more easily to be supported by different user-space software with that level of standardization rather than trying to make it an Intel-only attribute.
Above is one of the prior comparison screenshots of this Lunar Lake feature in action.
“Many a times images are blurred or upscaled content is also not as crisp as original rendered image. Traditional sharpening techniques often apply a uniform level of enhancement across entire image, which sometimes result in over-sharpening of some areas and potential loss of natural details.
Intel has come up with Display Engine based adaptive sharpening filter with minimal power and performance impact. From LNL onwards, the Display hardware can use one of the pipe scaler for adaptive sharpness filter. This can be used for both gaming and non-gaming use cases like photos, image viewing. It works on a region of pixels depending on the tap size.
This is an attempt to introduce an adaptive sharpness solution which helps in improving the image quality. For this new CRTC property is added. The user can set this property with desired sharpness strength value with 0-255. A value of 1 representing minimum sharpening strength and 255 representing maximum sharpness strength. A strength value of 0 means no sharpening or sharpening feature disabled. It works on a region of pixels depending on the tap size. The coefficients are used to generate an alpha value which is used to blend the sharpened image to original image.”
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