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Blurry rendering of games on Mac

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Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#231

Post by bbrks »

dlivingston wrote: post #86
pezezin wrote: post #39

Am I the only one who finds screens with rounded corners and notches really stupid? We had to struggle for decades with CRTs and their funky geometry, and when we finally get displays with perfect geometry, we botch them again to make them look... cooler?

I've got a MacBook with a notch and I literally never notice it. That's a common sentiment among MacBook users, btw -- I very rarely seeing people complain about the notch. I'm sure there are some, but seems to be a minority.

I frequently notice when my menubar items overflow and get truncated behind the notch with no built-in way to actually see them!

You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch.

[1] https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#232

Post by grishka »

trinix912 wrote: post #172
grishka wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you find anything with the dark-blue "documentation archive" header, then you know it's some good stuff. Though sometimes outdated.

We've come from the monstrous Inside Macintosh tomes, to that early OS X documentation (that's now in the documentation archive), to this seemingly programmatically generated from doc comments thing.

Next they'll start generating documentation from code using LLMs...

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#233

Post by gommm »

troupo wrote: post #195
phire wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the notch was replaced with a 1cm bezel, then the entire top menu bar would move down by roughly 1cm, and I'd have less screen space for actual content. In some ways, a bezel could be considered to be a "notch" that takes the entire width of the screen. Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar, So the notch gives me 1cm of extra screen space. It's nothing to do with thinness. It's about packing the l…

> If the notch was replaced with a 1cm bezel, then the entire top menu bar would move down by roughly 1cm, and I'd have less screen space for actual content. That perceived 1cm is largely meaningless for content. And you get less space in the top menu bar. > Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar I have 27 icons in my menu bar. Not because I collect them, but because quite a few apps add their icons t…

> The notch has been around for 4 years now, and Apple still hasn't provided a solution for the problem they introduced.

As a lot of people told you, you can just disable it. I've been doing that for 4 years, just set your resolution to a 16:10 ratio and you're good to go. The resolution is exactly the same as it was before they introduced the notch

Personally I like the fact that Apple gives us the choice. I dislike the notch and prefer my menu bar below because I use apps like intellij. My wife likes the notch and keeps it. So, both of us can have what we want.

Maybe Apple could have made it slightly easier to disable it by having an option instead of choosing a 16:10 resolution but, to be honest, most of the people who dislike it tend to be power users who can figure it out.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#234

Post by whstl »

wlesieutre wrote: post #24
behnamoh wrote: post #12

This just shows how little Apple cares about gaming on Mac. It's so sad that I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices (MBP, M Studio, etc.) only to be bottlenecked not by hardware, but by Apple's shitty approach to gaming software. I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts. We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true…

I think their bigger problem is there's shit for documentation. You get a big list of function signatures and if you actually want to know how you're supposed to use anything you find the WWDC session from 4 years ago and hope it's still accurate.

I can attest to that. I used to freelance doing porting about 10 years ago, and the main way of having a stable event loop for a game on macOS is not really anywhere clear in the documentation, at least not anywhere I could find.

Libraries and SDL, GLFW and Sokol handle this for you, and I had to poke inside them to actually figure out how to get the same performance of other games.

In a nutshell, the trick is simple, you call [NSApplication finishLaunching] and do a while-loop yourself instead of calling [NSApplication run].

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#235

Post by mcv »

mikestew wrote: post #137
crazygringo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, screen size is important. For the same size laptop, less bevel means more screen. And I don't about you but I don't hold the screen half of my laptop. Not unless the laptop is closed. So I don't see how that's a concern.

For the love of $DEITY, it’s bezel ! :-) https://www.howtogeek.com/762611/what-is-a-bezel/

I've often wondered about that, because I often see them used interchangeably (and not just here). But you're absolutely right. Here's a random site I found that explains it: https://www.difference.wiki/bevel-vs-bezel/

Is the similarity of the word the only reason they often get mixed up? I think another factor is that flat surfaces surrounded by an angled bevel are fairly common. For example. I just noticed that the bezel of one of my monitors is also beveled.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#236

Post by lightedman »

crazygringo wrote: post #100
mcdeltat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is bevel size really so important when it's already measured in mm? Personally I like a bit of bevel because I don't want the screen going to the edge of the device. The edge of the device is for holding, not interaction.

No, screen size is important. For the same size laptop, less bevel means more screen. And I don't about you but I don't hold the screen half of my laptop. Not unless the laptop is closed. So I don't see how that's a concern.

Hi, laptop repair tech here.

You want more bezel. Screens with less bezel have less overall edge protection and will break easier due to opening or closing forces or impacts.

Bezel-less screens are fragile pieces of junk.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#237

Post by burmanm »

rarepostinlurkr wrote: post #134
pdpi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WoW has always been exceptionally good at treating macOS like a first-class citizen. It's a shame Blizzard has stopped supporting macOS for their newer games.

If anything it's an example that games can be amazing on macOS, if developers take the time to learn and use the system. WoW on macOS is a far superior experience to WoW on Windows.

By what standard is it superior to WoW on Windows? Starting from the available hardware, the Windows world is far superior for WoW resulting in better visuals and more consistent fps which is a good start of having enjoyable experience.

Also I really can't think of the way Mac's mouse settings in WoW work better than the Windows ones. Scrolling, mouse movement are all having more settings under Windows to customize them compared to the experience on Mac (even with all the tools such as Mos to help with the bad external mouse handling in Mac).

So what exactly is so superior? I play WoW on both platforms and when I have a choice (that is, when playing at my home desktop - on my summer cabin I only have the Mac option) it's always the Windows one I select. It's nice that it works in Mac so I can play everywhere as I only have Mac laptop, but the sometimes weird graphics bugs, worse performance and odd issues with rendering displacing my WAs and other stuff just doesn't inspire confidence in Mac gaming compared to using Windows. And the mouse movement.. ugh.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#238

Post by acomjean »

lowkj wrote: post #65
goosedragons wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the handful of Mac ports exclusive to the Mac App Store, who with a lick of sense would choose to buy from there? Steam, GoG and Epic are all more feature rich, have more often sales/3rd party resellers and throw in the PC version too. On iOS there is no choice.

When No Man’s Sky first announced a Mac port, they promised to release on Steam and App Store. I waited a year after the Steam release for the App Store release which never came. I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would the…

I’ve been a long time iOS user. A fair amount of my purchased software won’t run anymore as it wasn’t updated from 32->63 bit change. I had some Mac software in the same boat. App Stores have some ease of use advantages, but it “just works” till at some point it doesn’t. I’ll angree it’s annoying to have be internet connected to use the software. FWIW the steam deck seems to work with games offline, so maybe they fixed some of those issues?

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#239

Post by gchamonlive »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #25
gchamonlive wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders. Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially in…

> Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market. Considering how the typical self-identifying "gamer" conducts themselves online, I think Apple might be on to something...

I have no idea how they behave online. I know however that in 2022 the market size of the gaming industry was over 200 billion in value.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#240

Post by mcv »

troupo wrote: post #203
account42 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course horseshit. Vulkan was being developed before Metal and Apple was even part of that development - they only dropped out once they decided to do their own thing instead. Vulkan is the primary rendering API on Android and Linux these days and also well supported on Windows by GPU vendors. Applications that don't use it yet generally don't because they don't need it and still OpenGL (ES) (or for Windows…

> This is of course horseshit. Vulkan was being developed before Metal and Apple was even part of that development It's fascinating that history is changing so fast now that even events of 10 years ago can be claimed to be something they weren't. - 2013: AMD starts developing Mantle, and it is only available as part of AMD Catalyst, and only on Windows. - 2013 (at least): Apple starts working on their own graphics AP…

History aside, what are the technical merits of Vulkan vs Metal vs D3D?

Wouldn't it make sense to simply implement the technically best solution everywhere?

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