Usage in 2D Graphical User Interfaces
As most computer monitors become more and more high resolution, everything displayed would be smaller. However, if the screen resoluion were turned down, everything would appear pixelated. Thus, resolution independence is currently being designed to solve this problem. With raster graphics, all icons need to be extremely high resolution, so as to not appear pixelated on higher resolution screens. This may take up enormous amounts of memory, and hard disk space. If vector graphics were used instead, it could be easily scalable and never lose data nor appear pixelated.
Some Graphical User Interfaces on Operating Systems such as IRIX use vector-based icons. A number of vector-based icon sets are also available for window managers such as GNOME and KDE.
With Windows, applications built using Windows Presentation Foundation (which is native to Windows Vista, but can be downloaded for Windows XP and Server 2003) are vector-based and scale losslessly based on Windows DPI settings. However, even without this, it has always been possible to build applications to be DPI-aware. Additionally, in Vista, the Desktop Window Manager detects when an app is not DPI aware and, if the computer is set to a different DPI than normal, uses bitmap scaling to render the window at a larger size.
New version of AmigaOS 4.1 enhanced in 2008 its Workbench with 2D vector graphical interface based on Cairo libraries, but pragmatically integrated it with a 3D Compositing Engine based on Porter-Duff Routines.
Read more about this topic: Vector-based Graphical User Interface
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