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Yep. Windows 10 is fantastic in this regard. MacOS on the other hand sucks. Basically the recommendation is to run a lower and blurry resolution if you want bi

Yep. Windows 10 is fantastic in this regard. MacOS on the other hand sucks. Basically the recommendation is to run a lower and blurry resolution if you want bigger buttons and text... At the same time, iOS has great scaling and text sizing options, and macOS’ interface is so abstract that it should be very easy to vectorize it, enabling seamless scaling to any size wanted. Really baffling.

alwaysanon 6y ago
Yep - all our screens at work are not 4K but 2K (1/2 being the ultra wide curved ones) and I find that the MacBooks look just awful on them as it doesn't see them as 'retina'. It was really strange at first as I always remembered Macs to have great font rendering when displays were even lower res than that but I can't stand how it looks on them. Having Windows scale to 150% on them just looks soo much better. I have a 4K 15" ThinkPad and a 4K 27" external at home and, even though they are the same resolution, they are such different sizes and I like to scale them differently to make things closer to the same size when I drag them back and forth - but only when docked. At other times I scale at a lower percentage to give me more realestate. With Windows I can do this on the fly these days without even logging off and everything looks great and 'just works'.
mlindner 6y ago
I'm sorry what? I've used Windows 10 scaling and it looks horrible compared to MacOS native 2x HiDPI scaling. The computers are made for HiDPI or not and it looks very natural compared to windows which doesn't scale all elements by the same amount.
- alwaysanon 6y ago
  This is only true for 4k monitors on MacOS - and I often run into non-4K monitors in my work hotdesking situation (though admittedly I mainly WFH at the moment). And Windows solved that not scaling elements by the same amount several years ago.
- leokennis 6y ago
  I use macOS on a good old 24” 1080p monitor. It’s either “tiny text town” or “blurry shit town”.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    24" 1080p is not hidpi; it is normal @1X scale. If you have it blurry, it is because you upscale @1X.
    - leokennis 6y ago
      Ok please help me then. I have a 1080p screen, and the default rendering of macOS is too small for me. How can I get the UI to be pixel perfect and bigger without setting a lower than native resolution? On Windows I do this by setting the scaling factor to 125%.
      - vetinari 6y ago
        When you switch resolution to lower; the operating system cannot do anything then, and whatever you see is either your GPU or your display scaler's fault. It will be not pixel perfect; but: In the display control panel, under "Customized" group, you should have "larger text" option, as the first one. This will keep the native display resolution, and the description will says that "it will look like XY resolution". However, I don't currently have @1X monitor available to test it; it works with @2X display, which might not be the same - it works by rendering at higher resolution, which is how @2X normally works. But worth a try.
        leokennis 6y ago
        That “larger text” option is the same, it will scale down to a non-display native resolution (except on the default setting). But because the pixels are so small, you notice it less. So I think we are both aware of what Windows and macOS can do. And for me it’s clear Windows solution is superior, as it can almost arbitrarily scale the interface to fit any size pixel perfect on any screen.
josephg 6y ago
Huh? I have a 4k TV I've been using connected to my gaming computer for awhile running windows 10. I've had no end of issues with various programs becoming horribly confused by display scaling. Some applications ignore the display scaling entirely and end up tiny, and other applications (particularly some games) end up with 4x size on UI elements - which looks utterly awful. Its pretty clear lots of game developers never test with HiDPI displays. In comparison I've never had a problem on macos. All macos applications I run seem to render correctly no matter what resolution and dpi settings my various displays use. And I can move most applications between displays just fine - with no pop-in or strange behaviour as the resolution of the containing monitor changes. (Except for some web browsers - which detect the transition and re-render content at the new resolution).
- alwaysanon 6y ago
  This is only true for 4k monitors with MacOS. Anything under that looks terrible these days as it won't offer the HiDPI modes on those.
- hollerith 6y ago
  If you restrict yourself to Google Chrome, Chromium-based Edge, apps using Electron and apps recently written by Microsoft (Settings, Timer, image viewer, video player, etc), then display scaling is very slick on Windows 10. (I didn't try with multiple monitors, but I did use the Settings app to change the scaling factor frequently.) On OSX in contrast, if you change the display resolution in System Preferences, most apps do not automatically adapt, with the result that you have to close their windows, then re-open them before your system is usable. And at non-integral scaling factors, everything is blurry at least on the non-retina displays I tried. In constrast, there is zero blurriness in the apps I just listed in Windows 10 regardless of which scale factor is chosen in the Settings app. On a 1080p monitor, the choices are 100%, 125%, 150% and 175%. Gnome also lets you choose the scale factor in increments of 25% and in a few months after more apps have been adapted to work "directly" with Wayland (without the intervention of XWayland) promises to be as slick as Windows 10 currently is. (In fact, I personally prefer Gnome because on Windows changing the scale factor by 25% can result the stems and lines of the letters becoming abruptly twice as thick, but I vastly prefer either to MacOS's blurriness when the display is not being run at its native resolution, but again I had the luxury of being very choosy about which apps I used on Windows, relying mainly on a web browser and vscode.)
girvo 6y ago
My MacBook powering my 4K monitor doesn’t look blurry at all, and I have it set to “2560x1440” scaling in the display settings. It does however run a tiny bit slower due to that non-integer retina scaling.
- jdashg 6y ago
  It does look surprisingly good, but it's still blurring unless they changed it this year. Alternating-color pixel grids always moire there.
  - girvo 6y ago
    I don’t believe they’ve changed it, but tbqh I swap back and forward daily from my MacBook to my gaming PC over the same DisplayPort connection, both set at 150% display scaling (basically), and for where I’m sitting I can’t tell the difference — and there are heap more UI elements on Windows (various icons, apps, etc) that look way way worse due to not being compatible, or having hi-res assets perhaps? For me it’s a bit of a wash day to day
sgt 6y ago
Have you even used macOS on a HiDPI display? I use this every day on several setups and it shines at handling this. Windows, while it can do HiDPI as well, it's basically become a turd in terms of user friendliness and experience.
- leokennis 6y ago
  I’m not talking about HiDPI. I’m talking about people who like all UI elements and text a little bigger.
  - sgt 6y ago
    Option key while choosing the "size" desired in Screen settings. Gives you more options and there's a solution for everyone. I think my resolution is 2640x something on my 4k. Crisp and large enough, although some would find it too small.
    - leokennis 6y ago
      I’m not saying it’s a lack of resolutions to choose from. Let’s say a default button is 100px wide with 10pt font size and I have a 1920x1080 screen. If I choose “125%” on Windows, it will render the button 125px side with 12.5pt font. With the caveat that I can render fewer buttons on my screen. On macOS I just need to pick a lower resolution, and then after al UI elements are rendered, scale it up to 1920x1080. This results in a scaled up and thus not pixel perfect and thus blurry picture. So Windows renders bigger UI elements at native resolution. macOS always renders a button 100px wide, you can just pick a lower resolution on a high res screen so those 100px seem bigger. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence
      - sgt 6y ago
        You have a good point with non-HiDPI screens like a 1080p screen, but I guess that's falling out of fashion anyway. With 4k screens the problem does not exist. The Windows solution is certainly an engineer's approach, but overall it's not necessarily the best when it comes to accessibility. Look at macOS accessibility settings - it's comprehensive.
chrismorgan 6y ago
When I heard what macOS did for fractional scaling, I said “wait, they can’t actually be doing that, surely? I mean, that’s obviously a stupidly bad way of doing it!” And even if the proper solution required more work for individual apps (it’d be only a tiny bit at most), Apple’s in a better position than Microsoft to require that their developers get it right. I’ve still not actually seen it for myself, and even having heard from multiple sources that yes, it really does work that way, I still find it hard to believe. It’s just… “here, let’s put higher-resolution displays in our laptops, but then scale things so badly that somehow it manages to be worse than a lower-resolution 1920×1080 panel would have been”. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I also find it utterly baffling.

alwaysanon 6y ago

Yep - all our screens at work are not 4K but 2K (1/2 being the ultra wide curved ones) and I find that the MacBooks look just awful on them as it doesn't see them as 'retina'. It was really strange at first as I always remembered Macs to have great font rendering when displays were even lower res than that but I can't stand how it looks on them. Having Windows scale to 150% on them just looks soo much better. I have a 4K 15" ThinkPad and a 4K 27" external at home and, even though they are the same resolution, they are such different sizes and I like to scale them differently to make things closer to the same size when I drag them back and forth - but only when docked. At other times I scale at a lower percentage to give me more realestate. With Windows I can do this on the fly these days without even logging off and everything looks great and 'just works'.

mlindner 6y ago

I'm sorry what? I've used Windows 10 scaling and it looks horrible compared to MacOS native 2x HiDPI scaling. The computers are made for HiDPI or not and it looks very natural compared to windows which doesn't scale all elements by the same amount.

alwaysanon 6y ago
This is only true for 4k monitors on MacOS - and I often run into non-4K monitors in my work hotdesking situation (though admittedly I mainly WFH at the moment). And Windows solved that not scaling elements by the same amount several years ago.
leokennis 6y ago
I use macOS on a good old 24” 1080p monitor. It’s either “tiny text town” or “blurry shit town”.
- vetinari 6y ago
  24" 1080p is not hidpi; it is normal @1X scale. If you have it blurry, it is because you upscale @1X.
  - leokennis 6y ago
    Ok please help me then. I have a 1080p screen, and the default rendering of macOS is too small for me. How can I get the UI to be pixel perfect and bigger without setting a lower than native resolution? On Windows I do this by setting the scaling factor to 125%.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      When you switch resolution to lower; the operating system cannot do anything then, and whatever you see is either your GPU or your display scaler's fault. It will be not pixel perfect; but: In the display control panel, under "Customized" group, you should have "larger text" option, as the first one. This will keep the native display resolution, and the description will says that "it will look like XY resolution". However, I don't currently have @1X monitor available to test it; it works with @2X display, which might not be the same - it works by rendering at higher resolution, which is how @2X normally works. But worth a try.
      - leokennis 6y ago
        That “larger text” option is the same, it will scale down to a non-display native resolution (except on the default setting). But because the pixels are so small, you notice it less. So I think we are both aware of what Windows and macOS can do. And for me it’s clear Windows solution is superior, as it can almost arbitrarily scale the interface to fit any size pixel perfect on any screen.

josephg 6y ago

Huh? I have a 4k TV I've been using connected to my gaming computer for awhile running windows 10. I've had no end of issues with various programs becoming horribly confused by display scaling. Some applications ignore the display scaling entirely and end up tiny, and other applications (particularly some games) end up with 4x size on UI elements - which looks utterly awful. Its pretty clear lots of game developers never test with HiDPI displays. In comparison I've never had a problem on macos. All macos applications I run seem to render correctly no matter what resolution and dpi settings my various displays use. And I can move most applications between displays just fine - with no pop-in or strange behaviour as the resolution of the containing monitor changes. (Except for some web browsers - which detect the transition and re-render content at the new resolution).

alwaysanon 6y ago
This is only true for 4k monitors with MacOS. Anything under that looks terrible these days as it won't offer the HiDPI modes on those.
hollerith 6y ago
If you restrict yourself to Google Chrome, Chromium-based Edge, apps using Electron and apps recently written by Microsoft (Settings, Timer, image viewer, video player, etc), then display scaling is very slick on Windows 10. (I didn't try with multiple monitors, but I did use the Settings app to change the scaling factor frequently.) On OSX in contrast, if you change the display resolution in System Preferences, most apps do not automatically adapt, with the result that you have to close their windows, then re-open them before your system is usable. And at non-integral scaling factors, everything is blurry at least on the non-retina displays I tried. In constrast, there is zero blurriness in the apps I just listed in Windows 10 regardless of which scale factor is chosen in the Settings app. On a 1080p monitor, the choices are 100%, 125%, 150% and 175%. Gnome also lets you choose the scale factor in increments of 25% and in a few months after more apps have been adapted to work "directly" with Wayland (without the intervention of XWayland) promises to be as slick as Windows 10 currently is. (In fact, I personally prefer Gnome because on Windows changing the scale factor by 25% can result the stems and lines of the letters becoming abruptly twice as thick, but I vastly prefer either to MacOS's blurriness when the display is not being run at its native resolution, but again I had the luxury of being very choosy about which apps I used on Windows, relying mainly on a web browser and vscode.)

girvo 6y ago

My MacBook powering my 4K monitor doesn’t look blurry at all, and I have it set to “2560x1440” scaling in the display settings. It does however run a tiny bit slower due to that non-integer retina scaling.

jdashg 6y ago
It does look surprisingly good, but it's still blurring unless they changed it this year. Alternating-color pixel grids always moire there.
- girvo 6y ago
  I don’t believe they’ve changed it, but tbqh I swap back and forward daily from my MacBook to my gaming PC over the same DisplayPort connection, both set at 150% display scaling (basically), and for where I’m sitting I can’t tell the difference — and there are heap more UI elements on Windows (various icons, apps, etc) that look way way worse due to not being compatible, or having hi-res assets perhaps? For me it’s a bit of a wash day to day

sgt 6y ago

Have you even used macOS on a HiDPI display? I use this every day on several setups and it shines at handling this. Windows, while it can do HiDPI as well, it's basically become a turd in terms of user friendliness and experience.

leokennis 6y ago
I’m not talking about HiDPI. I’m talking about people who like all UI elements and text a little bigger.
- sgt 6y ago
  Option key while choosing the "size" desired in Screen settings. Gives you more options and there's a solution for everyone. I think my resolution is 2640x something on my 4k. Crisp and large enough, although some would find it too small.
  - leokennis 6y ago
    I’m not saying it’s a lack of resolutions to choose from. Let’s say a default button is 100px wide with 10pt font size and I have a 1920x1080 screen. If I choose “125%” on Windows, it will render the button 125px side with 12.5pt font. With the caveat that I can render fewer buttons on my screen. On macOS I just need to pick a lower resolution, and then after al UI elements are rendered, scale it up to 1920x1080. This results in a scaled up and thus not pixel perfect and thus blurry picture. So Windows renders bigger UI elements at native resolution. macOS always renders a button 100px wide, you can just pick a lower resolution on a high res screen so those 100px seem bigger. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence
    - sgt 6y ago
      You have a good point with non-HiDPI screens like a 1080p screen, but I guess that's falling out of fashion anyway. With 4k screens the problem does not exist. The Windows solution is certainly an engineer's approach, but overall it's not necessarily the best when it comes to accessibility. Look at macOS accessibility settings - it's comprehensive.

chrismorgan 6y ago

When I heard what macOS did for fractional scaling, I said “wait, they can’t actually be doing that, surely? I mean, that’s obviously a stupidly bad way of doing it!” And even if the proper solution required more work for individual apps (it’d be only a tiny bit at most), Apple’s in a better position than Microsoft to require that their developers get it right. I’ve still not actually seen it for myself, and even having heard from multiple sources that yes, it really does work that way, I still find it hard to believe. It’s just… “here, let’s put higher-resolution displays in our laptops, but then scale things so badly that somehow it manages to be worse than a lower-resolution 1920×1080 panel would have been”. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I also find it utterly baffling.