Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

monitor choice dell 4k or apple

VirtualRain said:
Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. I run a non-native scaled resolution on my rMBP and it looks great. I suppose the same would work on this kind of monitor as well.

Personally, I'd prefer the desktop real estate that native 4K offers but that means 32" minimum to be usable.
Click to expand...

Exactly! I'm in the exact same spot as you are. Never used a 32" though, but I can imagine it would be awesome due to the real estate it would offer!
 
The reason the non-native modes look as good as they do on the rMBP is because things are rendered at twice the 'virtual' resolution and scaled down. Doing that to emulate 2560x1440 on a 4K display would mean rendering at 5120x2880, which isn't presently supported (per the Anandtech review) and which sounds like it could be pretty challenging.

Apple could conceivably just introduce 'real' non-integer UI scaling factors. They've avoided this, I think, because of the scaling artifacts it would introduce, but at retina resolutions those wouldn't be nearly as objectionable, as the quality of the virtual resolutions on the rMBPs already demonstrates.
 
chfilm said:
You lost me there :)
Click to expand...

Me too...

ZnU said:
Apple could conceivably just introduce 'real' non-integer UI scaling factors. They've avoided this, I think, because of the scaling artifacts it would introduce, but at retina resolutions those wouldn't be nearly as objectionable, as the quality of the virtual resolutions on the rMBPs already demonstrates.
Click to expand...

Isn't this what Apple does with the scaled resolutions on retina displays?... As I understand it, they upscale the native res by a factor of 2 and then downscale by a non-integer value to achieve the desired resolution. This works very well in providing sharp text and images at non-native resolution thanks to some excellent downsampling they've implemented. Or are you talking about something else?
 
VirtualRain said:
Isn't this what Apple does with the scaled resolutions on retina displays?... As I understand it, they upscale the native res by a factor of 2 and then downscale by a non-integer value to achieve the desired resolution. This works very well in providing sharp text and images at non-native resolution thanks to some excellent downsampling they've implemented. Or are you talking about something else?
Click to expand...

'Real' UI scaling wouldn't just mean rendering everything at 2x and then downscaling. It would mean directly drawing elements at at the screen's native resolution, but at arbitrary sizes. So a window title bar, say, could be directly drawn to be 20 pixels high, or 30 pixels high, or whatever. Currently the only options are 1x and 2x (20 pixels and 40 pixels in this example), to produce either a standard or 'retina' screen image, which then might be scaled as a whole to fit on the screen. That approach introduces unnecessary scaling artifacts and system overhead.
 
ZnU said:
'Real' UI scaling wouldn't just mean rendering everything at 2x and then downscaling. It would mean directly drawing elements at at the screen's native resolution, but at arbitrary sizes. So a window title bar, say, could be directly drawn to be 20 pixels high, or 30 pixels high, or whatever. Currently the only options are 1x and 2x (20 pixels and 40 pixels in this example), to produce either a standard or 'retina' screen image, which then might be scaled as a whole to fit on the screen. That approach introduces unnecessary scaling artifacts and system overhead.
Click to expand...

Ahhh yes of course now I get what you mean. Yea I was wondering why they didn't do that in the first place. I guess they ultimately will have to come up with a solution like that.

No 4k display for me before there's proper osx support.
 
chfilm said:
Ahhh yes of course now I get what you mean. Yea I was wondering why they didn't do that in the first place. I guess they ultimately will have to come up with a solution like that.

No 4k display for me before there's proper osx support.
Click to expand...

I think they didn't do this in the first place because they figured 1x and 2x pretty much covered them as long as they stuck to building machine with screens where one or the other of those scaling factors was a good fit. Yeah, they went and added the full-screen scaling feature, but mostly, I think, as an afterthought. They really want you to run in 'native' 1x or 2x depending on whether you have a normal or retina screen.

4K support throws a wrench in the works though, because at the 28-32" size that seems to be common for such displays, neither 1x nor 2x is really ideal (the former makes everything really small and the latter makes everything really big). A 24" 4K screen would work fine in 2x, but the sort of customers who buy screens that cost this much probably want more space than that. So Apple either needs to introduce arbitrary UI scaling factors, or hypothetically wait for something like 5K support and then do a 5K ~27" monitor that you'd run at 2x.

The good news is OS X does have the groundwork laid for arbitrary UI scaling. This feature was present as something developers could turn on and play around with in several versions of OS X. It was never quite perfect, especially with third-party apps that hadn't really been tested with it. But enabling this for OS X 10.10, testing first-party apps against it, and getting developers to test their apps against it, would probably be pretty straightforward. Just getting apps to run correctly at both 1x and 2x has probably caused both Apple and third-party developers to do a lot of the work already.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back