This is the sort of Apple gotchas that really upset me. They've got a good thing going, but they keep finding ways to alienate people.
Their suggestion : get an Apple monitor that we just launched.
New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
31–40 of 180 posts
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I don't get it. If you've got a 3840x2160 display, intended use on macOS as a 1920x1080@2x display, what is the advantage of using a 7680x4320 buffer? Everything is drawn at twice the width and height - and then gets scaled down to half the width and height. Is there actually a good reason to do this? (I use my M4 Mac with 4K displays, and 5120x2880 (2560x1440@2x) buffers. That sort of thing does work, though i…
> what is the advantage of using a 7680x4320 buffer? Everything is drawn at twice the width and height - and then gets scaled down to half the width and height. Is there actually a good reason to do this? Text rendering looks noticeably better rendered at 2x and scaled down. Apple's 1x font antialiasing is not ideal. Especially in Catalyst/SwiftUI apps that often don't bother to align drawing to round points, Apple's…
Feels like a huge power loss just to get slightly better text. You slow rendering down 4x for this
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#33I use a 4K 32'' Asus ProArt monitor and didn't notice any difference between my M2 Pro and my M4 Pro (on Sequoia). I will admit my eyesight is not the best anymore but I think I would notice given I'm a bit allergic to blurry monitors.
Anyway I will run the diagnostic commands and see what I get.
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#34Send it to Tim Cook email. It worked for me fixing DisplayPort DSC bug. After Catalina, later MacOSes lost ability to drive monitors at higher than 60Hz refresh. Apple support tortured me with all kinds of diagnostics, with WontFix few weeks later. Wrote email and it got fixed in Sonoma :) https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/4k144hz-no-longer-available...
No, it didn’t get fully fixed. Fucking with DP 1.4 was how they managed to drive the ProDisplay XDR. If your monitor could downgrade to DP 1.2 you got better refresh rates than 1.4 (mine could do 95Hz SDR, 60Hz HDR, but if my monitor said it could only do 1.2, that went to 120/95 on Big Sur and above, when they could do 144Hz HDR with Catalina). I would be absolutely unsurprised if their fix was to lie to the monitor…
Ahh, true, I now have 120Hz top, but it's fine, why I said fixed :) I now recall in Catalina I had full 144Hz and VRR options! Monitor is Dell G3223Q via Caldigit TS4 DP.
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#35The ideal work/coding resolutions and sizes for macOS that I would suggest if you are going down this rabbit hole.
24 inch 1080p 24 inch 4k (2x scaling) 27 inch 1440p 27 inch 5k (2x scaling) 32 inch 6k (2x scaling)
Other sizes are going to either look bizarre or you’ll have to deal with fractional scaling.
Given that 4k is common in 27/32 inches and those are cheap displays these kinds of problems are expected. I have personally refused to accept in the past that 27 inch 4k isn’t as bad as people say and got one myself only to regret buying it. Get the correct size and scaling and your life will be peaceful.
I would recommend the same for Linux and Windows too tbh but people who game might be fine with other sizes and resolutions.
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#36[flagged]
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#37This is not a normal retina configuration. This is a highly unusual configuration where the framebuffer is much larger than the screen resolution and gets scaled down. Obviously it sucks if it used to work and now it doesn't but almost no one wants this which probably explains why Apple doesn't care.
Isn't that just 2x supersampling? If you want "perfect" antialiasing that's the minimum you need, no?
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#38How did none of the Apple devs notice this? 4k 32" inch is the industry standard for HiDPI monitors.
Not in the Apple world, and this article is centered on Apple.
https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/
- 24" you need 4k
- 27" you need 5K.
- 32" you need 6k.
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#39The ideal work/coding resolutions and sizes for macOS that I would suggest if you are going down this rabbit hole. 24 inch 1080p 24 inch 4k (2x scaling) 27 inch 1440p 27 inch 5k (2x scaling) 32 inch 6k (2x scaling) Other sizes are going to either look bizarre or you’ll have to deal with fractional scaling. Given that 4k is common in 27/32 inches and those are cheap displays these kinds of problems are expected. I hav…
So MacOS supports only a handful of low dpi resolutions and high dpi must be an integer multiple of one of those?
Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
#40I thought I was going crazy when my new m4 seemed "fuzzier" on my external 4ks. I tried replicating settings from my old MacBook to no avail. I wonder if Apple is doing this on purpose except for their own displays.
It's a bit nit-picky on my part, but this bizarre world of MacOS resolution/scaling handling vs. other operating systems (including Windows 11 for crying out loud) is one of my biggest gripes with using Apple hardware.
I remember having to work hard to make my non-Apple display look 'right' years ago on an Intel-based mac due to weirdness with scaling and resolutions that a Windows laptop didn't even flinch handling. It was a mix of hardware limitations and the lack of options I had to address the resolution and refresh rates I had available over a Thunderbolt doc that I shouldn't have to think about.
I honestly hope they finally fix this. I would love it if they allowed sub-pixel text rendering options again too.