5 ms·

Something to keep in mind is that this is effectively a Windows monitor, not a Mac one. The reason for this is PPI: Most Apple displays are in the 100-110 PPI

Something to keep in mind is that this is effectively a Windows monitor, not a Mac one. The reason for this is PPI: Most Apple displays are in the 100-110 PPI range, with Retina Display Macs doubling that to 220 PPI. At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which sits right between Retina and non-Retina densities. This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, where the higher PPI means everything will be much smaller than it is on a normal monitor, or at 2x, where the lower PPI means everything will be much bigger than normal. Windows doesn’t have anything nearly as neat and simple as OS X’s 2x mode, but it’s had a rougher 150 PPI mode for years, which will probably look just about right on this screen. The best 4K monitor for Macs will be a 24”, which will have a PPI of 184, just about right for something sitting a bit further back from the viewer than a 220 PPI Retina Macbook Pro display.

andrewmunsell 13y ago
While certainly not ideal, you can probably use this with a Mac with no issues and turn on scaling. It won't be a native resolution of the monitor and wouldn't be great for day-to-day use, but if you hook your Macbook up to a monitor every once in a while it should be fine.
JackC 13y ago
> This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, ... or at 2x Huh. Are you maybe thinking of iOS, or have you confirmed this with a high-PPI external monitor on a Mac? Because it's not true of the built-in screen for retina MBPs. I typically use the 1.5x resolution (1920x1200) or 12/7x resolution (1680x1050), which are both supported by the built-in system prefs, and both look perfectly sharp as far as I can tell. Other resolutions are available via 3rd-party hacks and seem to work fine. The sharpness is supposedly because things are rendered at double resolution and then scaled down, which required some clever GPU work; whatever it is, it works for me. I'm prepared to believe that things don't work as well for third-party external monitors, though. Or maybe we're not ready yet to handle 60% more pixels, when the rMBP is already pushing performance limits?
- hyko 13y ago
  I think mortenjorck is talking about HiDPI mode, which doesn't provide as many options as retina mode: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enable-hidpi-mode-on-external-display-in-os-x-10-9-mavericks http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enabl...
  - mortenjorck 13y ago
    Yep. It would be great if Apple added full Retina scaling support to the next version of OS X, but I'd imagine the hardware might start to creak scaling 5120 x 2880 to 3850 x 2160.
  - JackC 13y ago
    Ah hah! I actually think that HiDPI mode and retina mode are the same thing, but the issue you're getting at is that OS X doesn't yet have drivers for external 4K monitors that support HiDPI mode.[1] Here's what's going on: on a retina MBP, the screen basically always runs in HiDPI mode. That means everything is rendered twice as large as it should be, for a screen twice as large as the virtual resolution you want, and then scaled down to native resolution. Icons that would be 32px are 64px, fonts that would be 12pt are 24pt, etc., and then they're shrunk down to their proper size. This is really cool because it lets us run at _any_ resolution between 1x and 2x with minimal loss of quality, even though apps are only coded to run at one of the two extremes. So, say I have a 2880x1800px screen on my rMBP, but I want a virtual extra-sharp 1920x1200px screen. I render the screen twice the size I want it (3840x2400) in HiDPI mode where everything is twice as large as it should be, and then I scale it _down_ in the graphics card to my native resolution of 2880x1800. This technique allows me to pick _any_ resolution between 1x (2880x1800) and 2x (1440x900) and have it look pretty good, because I'm only scaling down to my native resolution rather than up. Some stops along the way are nicer than others, and 1440x900 looks the best because it requires no scaling at all, but I have lots of options along the way that look good. The first thing you need for this to work is, obviously, for your apps to know how to render at 1x or 2x. 95% of Mac apps seem to be there by now. (The ones that aren't fixed still work fine -- they just look obviously low-resolution because they've been scaled up and back down.) Then you need your graphics card to be capable of rendering a screen with twice the virtual resolution you want, and scaling it down to your native resolution in realtime. That's a serious amount of processing, and apparently it's not supported so well yet for external 4K monitors. But importantly, it's something that only has to be solved at the driver level -- the OS and apps are already there. [1] See http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/15 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/... and search for "HiDPI."
rsync 13y ago
Can someone explain why this isn't just a continuous dial ? That is, why are there discreet "steps" in monitor scaling for these elements that you are talking about ? I would think that if I have 157 PPI or 220 PPI or 400 PPI that I would just adjust the dial to fit the element size I want. What's up ?
- wmf 13y ago
  App developers cannot write code that correctly renders at an arbitrary multiplier. It's been tried and it never works. Having 1x mode and 2x mode does work, which is why Apple uses that approach.
  - ajross 13y ago
    Considering that every 3D game qualifies as an app that renders correctly under arbitrary multipliers, that argument seems a little suspect. The real answer is that there is an industry of designers accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled anyway. Selecting integer multipliers (so far: "2") allows those assets to continue to render as designed on retina displays. Surely there are aesthetic reasons to prefer this in many cases, but it's not nearly as cut and dry a point as some people tend to think. Most recent Linux desktop themes are using vector assets, for example, with quite good results. Whether the Mac/iOS world is a community of pixel-exact perfectionist artistes or a bunch of dinosaurs who refuse to use modern tools is a flame war for a different thread.
    - mortenjorck 13y ago
      The real answer is that there is an industry of designers accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled anyway. That's an effect, but not the cause – the roots of the raster-based paradigm of modern GUIs are far more technical. I would point to the tradeoffs between speed and memory limitations in early GUI systems: If you look at the original Macintosh UI, you'll see a system more constrained by rendering speeds than by RAM, and thus a high emphasis on bitmaps versus vector rendering. Look at this Folklore.org story on the origin of the roundrect in System 1: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_E... It was only through a combination of Jobs' perfectionism and Atkinson's ingenuity that such a simple thing as rounded rectangles could be accomplished on the original Macintosh; can you imagine how long it would have taken to render a Finder window full of vector icons?
jrabone 13y ago
Wait, what? Windows has got full custom DPI control and has had for years. Under Windows 7 there's a dialog box to set it under the Appearance & Personalisation / Display control panel. You can toggle XP scale mode for compatibility with older apps. Seems rather more flexible than pixel-doubling - I thought that went out with underpowered games consoles, but apparently not. Where there is an issue is with icon scaling - since these are just multi-resolution bitmaps, if the person who made them didn't include the larger sizes you're going to have an ugly time at non-standard DPI settings.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  Yeah, except app devs screw it up and few things work right. Pixel doubling can be done entirely transparently to an app. And yes, so can other scaling, except a lot of apps opt-in to the "no I know what I'm doing, lemme scale myself" and then screw it up.
achamayou 13y ago
It's unfortunate to characterize a monitor that Mac OS doesn't support very well right now as Windows-only. At any rate, UHD looks like it's well on its way to becoming a very widespread standard, so it's not unreasonable to expect that Apple will improve support for it soon.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  > It's unfortunate to characterize a monitor that Mac OS doesn't support very well right now as Windows-only. Specially since changing dpi is usually trivial on any X server since the mid 80's.
maaku 13y ago
> At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which sits right between Retina and non-Retina densities. This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, where the higher PPI means everything will be much smaller than it is on a normal monitor, or at 2x, where the lower PPI means everything will be much bigger than normal. ... so? Who cares if the icons are 1.5cm instead of 1.0cm? For writing code, browsing the web, watching movies, having multiple terminals open, what does it matter?
jimmaswell 13y ago
isn't it expected that things are smaller on a higher-res monitor?
- JungleGymSam 13y ago
  That's what I thought. I'd rather have more screen real-estate than smoother fonts. Which is one thing I'm disappointed about with my Nexus 5. All these pixels and I still have the same amount of space on the homescreens? Hell!

andrewmunsell 13y ago

While certainly not ideal, you can probably use this with a Mac with no issues and turn on scaling. It won't be a native resolution of the monitor and wouldn't be great for day-to-day use, but if you hook your Macbook up to a monitor every once in a while it should be fine.

JackC 13y ago

> This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, ... or at 2x Huh. Are you maybe thinking of iOS, or have you confirmed this with a high-PPI external monitor on a Mac? Because it's not true of the built-in screen for retina MBPs. I typically use the 1.5x resolution (1920x1200) or 12/7x resolution (1680x1050), which are both supported by the built-in system prefs, and both look perfectly sharp as far as I can tell. Other resolutions are available via 3rd-party hacks and seem to work fine. The sharpness is supposedly because things are rendered at double resolution and then scaled down, which required some clever GPU work; whatever it is, it works for me. I'm prepared to believe that things don't work as well for third-party external monitors, though. Or maybe we're not ready yet to handle 60% more pixels, when the rMBP is already pushing performance limits?

hyko 13y ago
I think mortenjorck is talking about HiDPI mode, which doesn't provide as many options as retina mode: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enable-hidpi-mode-on-external-display-in-os-x-10-9-mavericks http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107846/how-to-enabl...
- mortenjorck 13y ago
  Yep. It would be great if Apple added full Retina scaling support to the next version of OS X, but I'd imagine the hardware might start to creak scaling 5120 x 2880 to 3850 x 2160.
- JackC 13y ago
  Ah hah! I actually think that HiDPI mode and retina mode are the same thing, but the issue you're getting at is that OS X doesn't yet have drivers for external 4K monitors that support HiDPI mode.[1] Here's what's going on: on a retina MBP, the screen basically always runs in HiDPI mode. That means everything is rendered twice as large as it should be, for a screen twice as large as the virtual resolution you want, and then scaled down to native resolution. Icons that would be 32px are 64px, fonts that would be 12pt are 24pt, etc., and then they're shrunk down to their proper size. This is really cool because it lets us run at _any_ resolution between 1x and 2x with minimal loss of quality, even though apps are only coded to run at one of the two extremes. So, say I have a 2880x1800px screen on my rMBP, but I want a virtual extra-sharp 1920x1200px screen. I render the screen twice the size I want it (3840x2400) in HiDPI mode where everything is twice as large as it should be, and then I scale it _down_ in the graphics card to my native resolution of 2880x1800. This technique allows me to pick _any_ resolution between 1x (2880x1800) and 2x (1440x900) and have it look pretty good, because I'm only scaling down to my native resolution rather than up. Some stops along the way are nicer than others, and 1440x900 looks the best because it requires no scaling at all, but I have lots of options along the way that look good. The first thing you need for this to work is, obviously, for your apps to know how to render at 1x or 2x. 95% of Mac apps seem to be there by now. (The ones that aren't fixed still work fine -- they just look obviously low-resolution because they've been scaled up and back down.) Then you need your graphics card to be capable of rendering a screen with twice the virtual resolution you want, and scaling it down to your native resolution in realtime. That's a serious amount of processing, and apparently it's not supported so well yet for external 4K monitors. But importantly, it's something that only has to be solved at the driver level -- the OS and apps are already there. [1] See http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/15 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/... and search for "HiDPI."

rsync 13y ago

Can someone explain why this isn't just a continuous dial ? That is, why are there discreet "steps" in monitor scaling for these elements that you are talking about ? I would think that if I have 157 PPI or 220 PPI or 400 PPI that I would just adjust the dial to fit the element size I want. What's up ?

wmf 13y ago
App developers cannot write code that correctly renders at an arbitrary multiplier. It's been tried and it never works. Having 1x mode and 2x mode does work, which is why Apple uses that approach.
- ajross 13y ago
  Considering that every 3D game qualifies as an app that renders correctly under arbitrary multipliers, that argument seems a little suspect. The real answer is that there is an industry of designers accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled anyway. Selecting integer multipliers (so far: "2") allows those assets to continue to render as designed on retina displays. Surely there are aesthetic reasons to prefer this in many cases, but it's not nearly as cut and dry a point as some people tend to think. Most recent Linux desktop themes are using vector assets, for example, with quite good results. Whether the Mac/iOS world is a community of pixel-exact perfectionist artistes or a bunch of dinosaurs who refuse to use modern tools is a flame war for a different thread.
  - mortenjorck 13y ago
    The real answer is that there is an industry of designers accustomed to doing per-pixel tuning of their art assets and this work is worthless if the assets are going to be scaled anyway. That's an effect, but not the cause – the roots of the raster-based paradigm of modern GUIs are far more technical. I would point to the tradeoffs between speed and memory limitations in early GUI systems: If you look at the original Macintosh UI, you'll see a system more constrained by rendering speeds than by RAM, and thus a high emphasis on bitmaps versus vector rendering. Look at this Folklore.org story on the origin of the roundrect in System 1: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_E... It was only through a combination of Jobs' perfectionism and Atkinson's ingenuity that such a simple thing as rounded rectangles could be accomplished on the original Macintosh; can you imagine how long it would have taken to render a Finder window full of vector icons?

jrabone 13y ago

Wait, what? Windows has got full custom DPI control and has had for years. Under Windows 7 there's a dialog box to set it under the Appearance & Personalisation / Display control panel. You can toggle XP scale mode for compatibility with older apps. Seems rather more flexible than pixel-doubling - I thought that went out with underpowered games consoles, but apparently not. Where there is an issue is with icon scaling - since these are just multi-resolution bitmaps, if the person who made them didn't include the larger sizes you're going to have an ugly time at non-standard DPI settings.

MichaelGG 13y ago
Yeah, except app devs screw it up and few things work right. Pixel doubling can be done entirely transparently to an app. And yes, so can other scaling, except a lot of apps opt-in to the "no I know what I'm doing, lemme scale myself" and then screw it up.

achamayou 13y ago

It's unfortunate to characterize a monitor that Mac OS doesn't support very well right now as Windows-only. At any rate, UHD looks like it's well on its way to becoming a very widespread standard, so it's not unreasonable to expect that Apple will improve support for it soon.

rbanffy 13y ago
> It's unfortunate to characterize a monitor that Mac OS doesn't support very well right now as Windows-only. Specially since changing dpi is usually trivial on any X server since the mid 80's.

maaku 13y ago

> At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which sits right between Retina and non-Retina densities. This means that on a Mac, you’ll have to use it one of two ways: Either at 1x, where the higher PPI means everything will be much smaller than it is on a normal monitor, or at 2x, where the lower PPI means everything will be much bigger than normal. ... so? Who cares if the icons are 1.5cm instead of 1.0cm? For writing code, browsing the web, watching movies, having multiple terminals open, what does it matter?

jimmaswell 13y ago

isn't it expected that things are smaller on a higher-res monitor?

JungleGymSam 13y ago
That's what I thought. I'd rather have more screen real-estate than smoother fonts. Which is one thing I'm disappointed about with my Nexus 5. All these pixels and I still have the same amount of space on the homescreens? Hell!