Going back nearly one year Intel has been working on Linux driver support for a new adaptive sharpening filter with Lunar Lake graphics. That’s culminated into working on a common DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences and this week the latest patch series for that property was posted.
Lunar Lake has a new adaptive sharpening filter that has minimal power and performance costs and so in turn Intel engineers have been pursuing a DRM sharpening/sharpness property for communicating on the surfaces where it should be utilized. Sent out today was the newest version of those patches.
Here’s an example previously shown by Intel Linux engineers:
The patch series cover letter sums it up as:
“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.”
Hopefully this DRM sharpness property manages to make it over the finish line soon.