Comment by chocochunks
1 day ago
MacOS doesn't handle HiDPI screens that well either. The most common and affordable high res monitors are 27" 4K monitors and those don't mesh well with the way macOS does HiDPI. You either have a perfect 2x but giant 1080p like display or a blurryish non-integer scale that's more usable.
And god forbid you still have low DPI monitor still!
Blows my minded that a 4k 27" monitor that was $500 a dozen years ago is still near top tier now.
5k has been surprisingly stagnant.
There were several promising 5K 27” MiniLED displays announced at CES a few days ago. People speculate that LG has produced the panel for the upcoming Apple Display refresh, but is also making it available for the other display manufacturers.
At some point additional resolution is a dimishing return. The human eye has limits.
5K 27” looks usefully better than 4K 27” to my middle aged eyes.
I’d prefer that to not be so, because 5K panels are so much more expensive. But in a side by side comparison it’s very obvious.
But the market has spoken: a quality 4K display is very good, certainly good enough, and the value for money is great.
I’m ok with spending more on a better display that I spend so much time with. The cost per use-hour is still very, very low.
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It's not just that: bandwidth needed to drive things above 4k or 5k is already over the limits of HDMI 2.0 (and 2.1 without all the extensions). DisplayPort is a bit better with 1.4 already having enough bandwidth for 8k30Hz or 4k at 120Hz or 8k60Hz with DSC.
When considering a single-cable solution like Thunderbolt or USB-C with DP altmode, if you are not going with TB5, you will either use all bandwidth for video with only USB2.0 HID interfaces, or halve the video bandwidth to keep 2 signal lanes for USB 3.x.
(I am currently trying to figure out how can I run my X1 Carbon gen 13 with my 8k TV from Linux without an eGPU, so deep in the trenches of color spaces, EDID tables and such as I only got it to put out 6k to the TV :/)
We're approaching that point but are not there yet
You can adjust this in settings.
In my experience it's a little hit and miss with macOS. You need a monitor that is specifically listed as being supported by macOS. If not you get rather strange results. I had a Dell monitor that, under macOS only, would sometimes freak out and flicker if you had to many electron apps open.
In some sense it's reasonable that you need a supported monitor, it's just strange that Linux can support all these monitors, but macOS can't?
Adjust it to what? Making a 4K monitor look like 1440p (or a non-1080p or 4K desktop) ends up with a non-integer scale on macOS AFAIK. They also completely tore out subpixel font rendering for low DPI displays.
I use a 4k/27" display and it's crisp as it gets at 125%.
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