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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

#61

Post by smcleod »

jiveturkey wrote: post #38
whatever1 wrote: post #13

How 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. Windows subpixel aliasing (Clear Type) manages a lot better with lower pixel density. Since Windows still has a commanding market share in enterprise, you might be right about the industry standard for HiDPI but for Apple-specific usage, not really.

Totally agree with those resolution suggestions. Personally I have a 32" 4k, I wanted a 5k or 6k back then (just too expensive) - but now I wish I had just got a 27" which is better suited to 4k - regardless it was a LOT better on the M2 Max with HiDPI working.

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

#62

Post by Gigachad »

whatever1 wrote: post #41
Gigachad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, I just went though all of the scale options on my M4 with 4k monitor and none of them rendered blurry. Might be a very situational bug. Doesn't seem as widespread as the title makes out to be.

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

#63

Post by mlyle »

sgerenser wrote: post #29
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.

I don’t know why this was downvoted, I agree that this is a highly unusual configuration. Why render to a frame buffer with 2x the pixels in each direction va the actual display, only to then just scale the whole thing down by 2x in each direction?

Because it's a decent way to get oversampling.

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

#64

Post by smcleod »

nuker wrote: post #7

Send 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...

I don't expect emails to get through to busy CEOs of huge companies like Apple unless you're really lucky and they make it through some automation, but I have dropped him an email just in case. I guess you never know.

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

#65

Post by Aurornis »

comex wrote: post #10

Well, it sounds like a real issue, but the diagnosis is AI slop. You can see, for example, how it takes the paragraph quoted from waydabber (attributing the issue to dynamic resource allocation) and expands it into a whole section without really understanding it. The section is in fact self-contradictory: it first claims that the DCP firmware implements framebuffer allocation, then almost immediately goes on to say i…

Agree. I started reading the article until I realized it wasn’t even self-coherent. Then I got to the classic two-column table setup and realized I was just reading straight LLM output.

There might be a problem but it’s hard to know what to trust with these LLM generated reports.

I might be jaded from reading one too many Claude-generated GitHub issues that look exactly like this that turned out to be something else.

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

#66

Post by MikeNotThePope »

smcleod wrote: post #64
nuker wrote: post #7

Send 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...

I don't expect emails to get through to busy CEOs of huge companies like Apple unless you're really lucky and they make it through some automation, but I have dropped him an email just in case. I guess you never know.

He has an army of people that would read his emails. A truly important one should get read.

You could always try calling, too! I cold called Marc Benioff at Salesforce and he actually picked up the phone.

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

#67

Post by moeadham »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #6
wronglebowski wrote: post #2

Props to the author for putting in what looks like ton of work trying to navigate this issue, shame they have to go to these lengths to even have their case considered.

I went to hell and back trying to get PIP/PBP monitors on my 57" g9 ultrawide to work with my M2 pro. ended up having to use a powered hdmi dongle, displaylink cable, and displayport, with 3 virtual monitors via betterdisplay. Allowing resolutions outside of macs limitations setting in BD is what did the trick. I don't envy OP. Having 5120x1440 @ lodpi was the worst, just ever so slightly too fuzzy but perfect UI siz…

betterdisplay is a life saver

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

#68

Post by TheTon »

wpm wrote: post #47
TheTon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then complain about that. That would make a much more sensible blog post and discussion. Asking for a crazy workaround to a sane problem isn't a great way to get good results, especially with Apple. Beyond the obvious performance pitfall, this scale up to scale down approach will also destroy the appearance of some controls. There is some UI that aims for 1px lines on hidpi modes that will get lost if you do this. It's hardly a perfect mode.

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

#69

Post by pier25 »

smcleod wrote: post #59
pier25 wrote: post #20

Is this for specific verisons of macOS? The article doesn't mention it.

It's in the environment and test setup (26.4 at the moment, but it is the same across all 26.x releases I've tried).

I'm still on Sequoia and haven't noticed these issues on my M4 Pro.

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

#70

Post by krackers »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #66
smcleod wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect emails to get through to busy CEOs of huge companies like Apple unless you're really lucky and they make it through some automation, but I have dropped him an email just in case. I guess you never know.

He has an army of people that would read his emails. A truly important one should get read. You could always try calling, too! I cold called Marc Benioff at Salesforce and he actually picked up the phone.

This needs a story. What did you say to him?
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