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New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

smcleod.net

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Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#41

Post by whatever1 »

Gigachad wrote: post #30
whatever1 wrote: post #13

How did none of the Apple devs notice this? 4k 32" inch is the industry standard for HiDPI monitors.

Tbh I'm not even sure what the issue is here. I have a personal M1 macbook and a work M4 and a 4k display. I don't see any issues or differences between them on my display. The M4 seems to be outputting a 4k image just fine. The article could just be AI slop since it just contains hyper in depth debugging without articulating what the problem is.

In layman terms, for some UI scaling options, text is rendered blurry by M4/M5 Macs.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#42

Post by wmf »

jbellis wrote: post #39
compounding_it wrote: post #35

The 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?

It doesn't have to be but it's really designed to run at exactly 2x scale.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#43

Post by danny8000 »

compounding_it wrote: post #35

The 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…

32" 4k display at fraction scaling of 1.5 (150%) is fine for my day-to-day work (Excel, VS Code, Word, Web browsing, Teams etc.). It delivers sharp enough text at an effective resolution of 2560x1440 px. There are many 32" 4k displays that are affordable and good enough for office workers. I work in a brightly lit room, so I find that monitor brightness (over 350 nits) is the most important monitor feature for me, over text sharpness, color accuracy, or refresh rate.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#44

Post by wmf »

phonon wrote: post #37
wmf wrote: post #5

This 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?

Yes, it is supersampling but historically almost no one runs that way.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#45

Post by wpm »

halapro wrote: post #32
kalleboo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes but Apple got to drop subpixel anti-aliasing support because this workaround is "good enough" for all of their built-in displays and overpriced mediocre external ones, so we all get to suffer having to render 4x the pixels than we need.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#46

Post by [deleted] »

wmf wrote: post #5

This 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.

[deleted]

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#47

Post by wpm »

TheTon wrote: post #19
TheCoreh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if I understand it correctly, this is more like 2160p@2x which is... unusual?

Yes, I would actually be surprised to learn that mode is available on any system. I’ve never seen that anywhere, though I only have a M1 Pro and an M4 Pro (and various Intel Macs). You’re rendering to a framebuffer exactly 2x the size of your display and then scaling it down by exactly half to the physical display? Why not just use a 1x mode then!? The 1.75x limit of framebuffer to physical screen size makes perfect…

Because 1x mode has no subpixel antialiasing and thus looks absolutely terrible.

I have a 32:9 Ultrawide I would love to use on macOS but the text looks awful on it.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#48

Post by NBJack »

wmf wrote: post #5

This 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.

To be frank, it's kind of embarrassing if an entry-level Windows laptop with a decent integrated GPU handles this without much effort.

Apple is free to make its own choices on priority, but I'm disappointed when something that's considered the pinnacle of creative platforms sporting one of the most advanced consumer processors available can't handle a slightly different resolution.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#49

Post by stefanfisk »

wmf wrote: post #42
jbellis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So MacOS supports only a handful of low dpi resolutions and high dpi must be an integer multiple of one of those?

It doesn't have to be but it's really designed to run at exactly 2x scale.

What makes you say that? Unless I am mistaken, it’s only the Pro models who run at 2x by default.

Re: New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

#50

Post by smcleod »

compounding_it wrote: post #35

The 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…

For me it would be 16-27" 4k is fine, but and as you go up to 32" I'd be wanting 5 or 6k ideally as it's quite noticable for text (even when high DPI scaling is working and across operating systems).
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