Macos fractional scaling. 200% scaling would make it 720P display.

Macos fractional scaling 10. Most of the MacOS UI scaling options should produce sharp and detailed looking UI elements (e. In windows my scale was 250% and it was fine, now in pop os I want it but scale ain't more than 200%… Nov 25, 2022 · On the specific topic here, fractional scaling, macOS gets it disastrously wrong, only supporting downscaling, which means that it’s impossible to get pixel-perfect output on fractional scales, which are the norm on most of their devices. These two resolution-screen size pairs I can thus add to my list. I'm having a small issue with fractional scaling in Pop OS 19. The problem is entirely with how MacOS scales and how fractional scaling does not work perfectly. Some of the guests run in Virtualbox Remote Desktop at the remoting-clients' native monitor resolutions, some wide-screen, and all larger than 1024x768. Feb 4, 2025 · GDK_SCALE is applied to Xft. Note, currently fractional scale factor is not supported on Linux in the JRE-managed HiDPI mode. If I use native resolution, everything is a bit small -- I can see everything but without sub-pixel font smoothing the rendering looks bad. I just rememberd now that you can try increasing the font dpi using Gnome Tweaks which should work fine on low-medium DPI screens. Jan 5, 2019 · MacBook Pro 15in 2017 connected to two 32 inch Samsung monitors: 4k monitor at 3840x2160 native full monitor at 1920x1080 native Please refer screenshot My question is, with display scaling I would have thought it should only scale the GUI, not images or video like in Windows. However, Apple cannot just reinstate the fractional scale factor feature in macOS (I'm pretty sure it would be just a couple lines of code to do that) since it has been several years since Mac OS X Snow Leopard when developers could test fractional scale factors. I've been doing that for the last 8 years. I run with 2x 27" 1440p displays. gnome. I seriously can’t comprehend how they ended up going that way, given that they were the ones in a I assume that a 1440p display that is 27-inch will also provide perfect scaling on macOS, since it is exactly half the resolution, but exactly the same size of a 5K display. A 1440p 27 inch monitor has ~110ppi while a 4K 27 inch monitor has a 165ppi. But something was off, it seems that Apple has reduced the options for screen resolution. Apple's default 2x scaling for Retina displays should yield the best results. Fractional scaling looks like dogshit on every operating system Horse. 200% scaling would make it 720P display. Nov 6, 2023 · Enable fractional scaling in VSCode on Ubuntu. . May 2, 2019 · Quick guide to enable correct color mode and 125% scaling on external Dell 4K (2650 x 1440) monitors with your MacBook. My 2K monitor now looks pretty good. I use 4k screens at 27 inches and things just look goofy at 200% scaling, would greatly prefer to be at 175% or 150% scaling. Under your 4K display, turn on "Edit the system configuration of this display model", then check "smooth scaling" and "add near-native hiDPI resolution", then apply the settings on the left, and pick whatever display resolution you want (or slide the Display Mode slider), and it will scale your display properly, giving you pin-sharp text at Modern Wayland sessions support fractional scaling out of the box, although it remains partially experimental. A 4K monitor can scale to “looks like 1080p” by using twice the number of pixels to draw the interface keeping text and images sharp and clear. The performance exceeds my expectation by a lot, I meant a lot. Most 4k monitors are 27 inches or bigger and most laptop screens are 14-15 inch 1080p displays and they need fractional scaling. For example, when I dock with a single large monitor I have Slack and Thunderbird on the laptop with the scaling handled by the apps themselves. they don't change the available underlying screen resolutions, but they do change the apparent space on the screen) Fractional scaling is tricky, macOS doesn't support it either, it scales everything to double and then shrinks, not all windows applications look good with fractional scaling, but the popularity of high pixel density displays on 14"-15" monitors made developers update their applications to support the new standards. If this does bother you (it bothers me), fractional scaling will seem broken on Wayland. Dec 11, 2020 · After nine months working from home, I upgraded to MacOS Big Sur. If this doesn't bother you, you'll think fractional scaling works fine on Wayland. I wouldn't take fractional scaling out again, there is a work around, but this problem needs to be addressed. Oct 6, 2016 · MacOS's anti-aliasing is more accurate, but uses more sub-pixel artefacts, which can look blurry, particularly on lower-density pixel displays. I use an AMD 6800xt GPU (if it matters). You can do "fractional scaling" in Pop by just setting your font size larger. Kwin offers fractional scaling in the plasma display settings right now, but it is implemented as "draw at 2x and then scale down". the issue is that they also achieve it by telling all apps "scale or die". The '1440p scaled resolution' in MacOS looks great. Dec 11, 2023 · This was removed from macOS a while back after Apple transitioned its own product line to high PPI displays (subpixel rendering is fundamentally incompatible with fractional bitmap scaling which is the cornerstone of Apple's current approach with macOS - subpixel rendered structures do not survive raster scaling -, so the removal should be Hackintosh is working on my ThinkPad 14" with 1920x1080 display. dpi as well (since 2019. I'm wondering if it's possible for me to enable fractional scaling in pop os 20. The second-from-last could also mean "default" resolution which is 2x scaling, so not fractional scaling (1. Unfortunately there are still issues with games. There's also a command line tool in home-brew called displayplacer that can enabled this mode with the "scaling:on" option added to the command. Non- Integer scaling 125,150,175% tries to split up a pixel into fractions which is impossible so processes such as anti aliasing are used. What you end up with using Microsoft's approach is three different scaling modes all active at once. This brings higher GPU and CPU (since GTK is not fully hardware accelerated) usage, more power consumption, and in some cases significantly slower 2 When you don't set the expansion ratio to 200% or 100% (no-scaling), screen looks somewhat blurry because of the OS scaling. The scale is unfortunately not always the same for each monitor / GPU combination. Other folks think straight up 1440p is just fine. 21Hz option. Help 4k display at 3840x2160 resolution, 200% fractional scaling works somewhat, but it is a little too small. Is there a list of complete resolution and screen size pairs available which provides perfect scaling on Sep 8, 2023 · Hi, GDK_SCALE only applies to xwayland applications (legacy apps that only runs on xorg), and fractional scaling does not work for those apps. I can zoom in on some apps, but not all of them; system fonts can't be changed at all. Using this option may result in elements appearing overly large. Feb 17, 2023 · However, if you reduce it to the equivalent of 2560 x 1440 on a 4K monitor, macOS calculates scaling differently because 3840 x 2160 divided by 2560 x 1440 is 1. 4 Distro: Zorin OS 16 base: Ubuntu 20. May 2, 2019 · Apple instead chose to fix their scaling to a factor of 2, which is inflexible, but makes HiDPI software trivial to write and also enables faster drawing algorithms (since you don't need to take fractional lien widths into account). dpi defines a fraction scale, then the IDE is automatically switched to the legacy IDE-managed HiDPI mode (and the GDK_SCALE is not applied). When asked . In setting it uses Default 2560x1440. (Instructions for Windows and OSX). g. old software) or applies the same technique as MacOS (e. zip file, and drop the BetterDummy. 4) installed Mac Pro (Late 2013) . 11. 04 LTS Focal Machine: Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 20L8S23W00 v: ThinkPad T480s serial: <filter> Mobo: LENOVO model: 20L8S23W00 v: SDK0J40697 WIN serial Fractional scaling is the main reason I switched from gnome to kde, but the Cosmic DE has everything I need, a good theme, the tiling feature, written in Rust lol, fractional scaling is the remaining piece of the puzzle. Hi guys, been wondering why, in 2024, MacOS is still stuck what seems like UI scaling prehistory. Nov 23, 2021 · Fixing 1440p on M1 Macs with BetterDummy. mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']" To enable fractional scaling in Ubuntu 19. It just does a bad job with it where it's less sharp for anything that is not integer scaled. Nov 15, 2015 · Safari in macOS has variable scaling using theZoom In and Zoom Out menu options. Q2 - I am kind of disappointed with the overall Mac experience so far, I expected something much superior to windows or the current ubuntu . 1080p is a more comfortable scale but then things start to look blurry. How come your setup produces different results? Edit: Nvm, figured it out. I have a 4k 120hz and 1440p 144hz dual monitor set up. I seriously can’t comprehend how they ended up going that way, given that they were the ones in a Better display fixed this for me. We can say fractional scaling is hard for a lot of reasons. 25x), and that is not as taxing on the GPU (integer vs floating point calculation). Display -> Resolution set to: Scaled -> instead of default pick something towards more space. You run into the same issue even if you use an Apple 5-6K screen and use anything but the integer scalable 200% default setting. I suspect this tricks MacOS into believing it is a true 2x scaling and thus is allowed instead of an arbitrary scaling value. What is scaling, anyway? When using the 3456x2234 screent at a 100% scale - or no scaling. 5, not 2. 1440p at this point is not worth it unless you are going for high refresh rate display for gaming. For example, there is a new monitor with 3:2 aspect ratio from BenQ (model RD280U) that is 28. So the best bet was building it into the newer protocols (Wayland) and then Looking whacky, sounds like a bug, perhaps hardware specific. web pages and bitmap images). looks gorgeous with BD ) but it isn't really a solution, full screen stuff seemingly isn't always detected to my m1 tries to run eve at something close to 8k f. What a 4K monitor gives you is the PPI of a 4K monitor and the scaling of a 1440p monitor. Linux’ support of high-DPI displays is still lacking compared to Windows and especially macOS, however with a few easy tweaks we can solve this. One of the issues I had with Ubuntu is fractional scaling per mon MacOS does support fractional scaling too. org and fractional scaling on my laptop. This isn’t the fault of macOS. Do note that scaling does use more computer resources than just driving the display with no scaling. Fractional scaling on X. These are the resolutions I can use apaprently: 1440p looks really nice, but everything is so tiny. 4k is the Hi. GTK applications will still require the compositor to make it work, so our compositor will do that. text, fonts, icons, palettes) on a 4K monitor. Catalina used 3440x1440 resolution as the default display, this looks crips and clear but the texts looks… May 18, 2023 · I am using USB-C Apple thunderbolt cable. For a long time, for work, I would use Ubuntu, and Win10 for gaming (and MacOS on my laptop for work/travel). Using fractional scaling, e. Download the latest version of BetterDummy from Github, extract the . 32 on Wayland run: gsettings set org. org is not actually supported, but rather a patch that System76/Canonical have applied on their version of Gnome while Wayland's fractional scaling is still in beta, which is enabled because of System76's patch. I guess I refer to scaling as the scaling of the menus. This has the benefit of the image being proportionally the exact same. The display driver then downsizes from the 5120x2880 virtual display to the 3840x2160 physical display. Well, you're right. Fractional scaling works very well in Windows 10/11 just so long as you use apps that support DPI scaling. Increase the scaling of both displays and lose all your screen real-estate on your working ultrawide. Jun 4, 2000 · If, however, you're talking about bitmapped icons - unless you provide lovingly hand-finished bitmaps for every possible scale (haven't counted, but it's a lot more than 2), even Windows will still use fractional scaling and create artefacts (possibly worse than Apple's 2x-and-downsample, depending on how the app is coded). To be honest, it doesn't look as nice as Windows because of fractional scaling. Still working on a way of making these environment variables apply if the application is booted through Unity Hub, but no success yet. Also, if you use a 1440p monitor at its native resolution, your text will be far too small. I have a laptop and a 2014 dell monitor for an old computer (19201080 and 1600900) So the same problem happened in ubuntu where after making the builtin screen use 125% the other screen zoom to the top left corner But after some tinkering it was perfect But not for pop after countless tries and I know this doesn't directly address your problem, but I've tried fractional scaling for a while on macOS/M1 (where arguably it works the best of all the platforms I'm aware of), and I think the entire idea of fractional scaling just isn't great in practice. However, if you were to use 3840x2160 @ 60 Hz in 100 % (no scaling), everything will be tiny and may cause eye strain, but you shouldn’t experience any weirdness since it is Apple could absolutely have done fractional scaling, and it’d have worked just fine for them; the present situation in how well high-DPI stuff works across platforms would be indistinguishable: macOS would still have basically nothing broken, and Windows would still have quite a few widely-used pieces of software getting it wrong. macOS is able to imitate fractional scaling by rendering an integer scaling image and then resizing it to fit the screen, as far as I can understand. 04 LTS. 38. Fractional scaling is even better on macOS, when it lets you do it. Normally, Apple runs at a scale of 200%, doubling the size of everything on screen. BetterDummy clearly shows how macOS could look on different displays ( mine f. 26 display setting "Apply scaling themself"). Native screen resolution 2. For example, Doom Eternal still shows up in the upper left corner of the screen but behaves as if it is in full screen mode, as set. Nov 15, 2018 · It is quite fiddly to use, but it opens up a bunch of resolutions which your monitor supports but which Mac OS hides by default You can also use it to add additional Scaled resolutions (same as scaling on your retina display, i. Nov 8, 2022 · OS developers use different types of means to scale with varying amounts of success. With Apple 1) supporting iPads as a sidekick screen 2) only providing 2 external screens 3) selling laptops mainly in their computer lineup (computers that are meant to travel and be able to connect to whatever is available), I would have imagined,Apple wanting to preserve homogeneity of UX Feb 17, 2023 · In this case, macOS renders the screen at 5120 x 2880 to a virtual buffer, then scales it down by 2 x to achieve 2560 x 1440. Shit. Apr 22, 2020 · Some folks think 4K scaled to 1440p looks better than straight up 1440p. Nov 30, 2022 · On Ubuntu I have several options - to activate "Large text" option, to use "fractional scaling". Fractional scaling in Wayland is handled "the Apple way", which is to render everything at the closest (higher) integer scaling factor and then downscale the rasterized output. Enabling fractional scaling helps those with higher-resolution screens achieve optimal readability and presentation. System: Kernel: 5. Something that X11 and Mac OS does is superscaling and then downscaling. 04. Apple doesn't seem to care as this has been the case for many years. they have a very good fractional scaling system. Fractional scaling issue on a 4k display, I need 225% or 250%, anything else is too small or too large. As gnome 3. it doesn't wake up from sleep correctly and all in all its You can scale the relative size of text and images on those pixels. So please set env = GDK_SCALE,2 and let the native wayland applications use 1. In the 4K When utilizing native scaling, macOS will provide a 2x scaling option, which is half of 3840 x 2160 (1920 x 1080). X implements fractional scaling, and it is communicated to the applications through XWayland (assuming the plasma 5. 1, see 3). I also believe fractional scaling such as 1440p on 4K (1:1. When I use the 1280 x 720 option the Scaling is large text and font , and all apps just scale badly but the Text is much smoother and sharper. yes, fractional scaling is the term. There's some tricks the compositor can do to make software kind of work okay with fractional scaling even if the toolkit lacks it. I have a Dell Vosto 3525, with a 1080p 120hz display, and an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U. 32 came with experimental fractional scaling support, I decided to try it out. The resolution options of CG318-4K are as follows when using with the OS X Yosemite (10. This means that things will be come incredibly small and hard to read. 1. Here’s why: Fractional scaling works by upscaling by a large factor and downscaling by a smaller one. Scaling only works with apps thats support it or use the manufacturer’s libraries, as they will have scaling support by default A 4K monitor scaling to 1440p is still sharper than a 1440p monitor. Jan 9, 2022 · Screen tearing is obvious when fractional scaling set to 125%. If you're using a non-Retina screen, then Jun 5, 2021 · When you choose 'looks like 2560x1440' and that is not an integer scale factor of 4K (3840x2160), macOS creates a virtual display twice the size (i. 5 scaling. Jan 25, 2022 · The goal of this article is to let graphic designers know how MacOS handles UI scaling, and how Photoshop responds to different scaling options on 4K displays or Retina displays from Apple. To enable fractional scaling in GNOME 3. I ve heard that fractional scaling works really well with wayland so i decided to give it a go and when i went to the fractional scaling section on display, i open it and it doesn't work. app file into your Applications folder. I didn't even know gnome supported per-display scaling without fractional scaling. If these displays had PPI to support HIDPI mode then integer scaling (200%) would make it right, but we're not there. 04 LTS Focal Machine: Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 20L8S23W00 v: ThinkPad T480s serial: <filter> Mobo: LENOVO model: 20L8S23W00 v: SDK0J40697 WIN serial I recommend using Wayland with fractional scaling - at least I had serious battery issues running X. A 2x scaling will give you the sharpest results, and that's the default and usually pretty good. 2" with 3840 x 2560 resolution. Integer scaling such as 200 or 300% is best because it works perfectly with pixels. I believe Windows uses fractional scaling, meaning 125%, 150%, 175%, etc scaling instead of only 100% and 200% like macOS. There is, but fractional scaling makes text and icons somewhat blurry on Wayland apps and increases overall responsiveness and input latency. You do not need to switch your monitor to the native 4K resolution to watch Video, Mac OS will handle this May 28, 2023 · Have been testing, pixel sniffing and what not for many hours. 0-44-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A Desktop: Gnome 3. Secondly, windows allows you to scale without changing resolution yes, but a lot of apps dont support it and will fall back to looking blurry and low-res. 12. e. Where it doesn't work - Windows either completely ignores the interface scale (e. This is actually better than the fractional scaling provided in normal GNOME because it does not try to force the system to draw things across half-pixels, resulting in blurriness. I'll try to explain my problem better, but my English isn't the best. The downscale thus doesn't always happen, and doesn't happen with default settings. but there are a couple major key points, firstly being that preexisting fractional scaling methods are subpar. 25 For custom values like 110% you will need to upscale by 11 times and downscale by 10. Sep 1, 2020 · I'm currently running Mac OS Mojave. I guess I didn't formulate my problem correctly. Use "Fractional scaling" which allows for independent scaling for each monitor, but then breaks dozens of apps like Steam and prevents games from properly identifying your main monitor's resolution and refresh rate. Native resolution divided by 2 (2x scaling) In your case 3840 x 2160 (native) or 1920 x 1080 (2x scaling) Everything in between will results in performance issues or blurry UI/text Definitely go with 4k - i have both while 1440p was a mistake (non hidpi scaling makes everything look blurry) Even if you’ll scale display you’ll still benefit from higher pixel density, so everything will look much-much sharper. So for instance 125% means that everything is upscaled by 5x and downscaled by 4x. 4) - macOS Sierra (10. The main drawback is performance related. AFAIK, Windows and MacOS have pretty stable fractional scaling at this point with only minor issues so it's not like it's impossible to implement. The reason Mac OS looks so good is Apple's screens (which are usually at integer-scaling resolutions or just really high DPI) At a high level, there's integer scaling (1x vs 2x) or fractional scaling (100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, etc) Traditional Linux desktops run on very old, hacked-together protocols (namely X11), and it was too late to add proper fractional scaling on top of all the hacks. 2560x1440x2 looks fine on a 27” 4k monitor the issue is that the os is designed for a minimum ppi that a 27” 1440 monitor just cannot provide Posted by u/Dizzy-Palpitation-39 - 4 votes and 1 comment Aug 28, 2003 · There are only 2 modes to run macos in Hdpi without losing performance 1. macOS does ONLY integer scaling and that’s the issue (i was writing this at 1am, got it mixed up) what surprises me is that Apple who never shies away from removing legacy support, didn’t force developers to make their apps support fractional scaling macOS (iOS too, see iPhone Plus or mini models) would render the entire screen at 2x and scale it down to 1. The Pop theme has been developed to size many elements based on font size. I hope you can see the problem here. So if you are at the correct scaling setting it will render the UI at exactly the resolution of the screen. All software (OS and applications) writes to that double size display. This works if you only use high resolution monitors as it masks artifacts, but it's really not ideal: rendering is blurry by design, especially text. The result is blurry pixels, higher memory usage, more work for the GPU to do, and shorter battery life for laptops. but the Text Image is Terrible , blurry and not sharp at all. 5120x2880). 5x, might give you slightly less sharp results, but I wouldn't characterize them as 'blurry' normally. 2. 5x or 1. Dec 11, 2023 · Weird. So if Xft. macOS fractional scaling will feel a bit laggy compared to Wayland, but at least you won't have to deal with blurry windows anymore. Comment from dev: it won't go past 60 its a limitation of the way they do the mirroring. Is there no way to reach a happy medium? With normal display settings i get two choices - 100% or 200% and neither of them are usable for me so i tried fractional scaling at 150% (which was fine other than youtube not working and it sucking my battery life away). Jan 4, 2016 · If so, then here's one possible use for fractional scaling: My office Windows 7 host has a 1024 x 768 screen because that's all it needs. In short: you can't select a fractional scaling without some loss of sharpness. The monitor is still receiving a 4K signal, but now you can actually use your computer. to this date, only android has gotten it dead on. As a workaround, you may explore scaling set to 100% and attempt to scale the application windows on your laptop independently. Aug 30, 2024 · I wonder how MacOS deals with scaling different aspect ratios. Display scaling -- this method of rendering the screen at a higher resolution and then scaling down by 2 x -- is how macOS can render smoothly at many different display resolutions. I recommend using Wayland with fractional scaling - at least I had serious battery issues running X. Compared to the visual experience of native scaling in Windows 11, I would say the MacOS's primitive scaling method surprisingly gives a much better visual experience. Oct 15, 2024 · …until you run Asahi Linux and learn that you either get 100% or 200% scaling for your display. 25x after. But any fractional scaling factor will do that integer + scaling down thingy. When I activate the Fractional Scaling and put the scale to 125%, the refresh rate looks low, even if I keep the 120. The way Mac OS scales is the way Wayland compositors currently handles fractional scaling. So like, instead of changing the resolution to make the menus bigger (or scale them), MacOS should in my opinion set the best resolution automatically and just let you scale SVG icons or something fractional scaling is fine in macos. I m using pop os for some time and due to my 1080p 13'' laptop monitor i have to use fractional scaling (150%). So let’s create the resolutions. Setting scaling to 100% or 200% is a work around. So if you want this quality at 34" there are several 5120x2160 displays that would scale much better. On Xorg, the feature may have limitations or require additional configuration workarounds. 04 on Xorg run: Jan 21, 2020 · The dilemma started after a few days of using my new Specter Pro Ultrawide 2K/QHD monitor. And it was a problem, because on such a Hello everyone, I have just installed popos and i love it But for my dual monitors is not that good. macOS will render the entire screen to a virtual canvas, then bitmap scale it up or down to the desired size. Alternatively, if you opt for a workaround to enable 2560 x 1440 resolution, you may encounter a blurry issue. But it does come with a couple of caveats. I can't describe exactly what the value is, but it's lower t May 2, 2019 · Quick guide to enable correct color mode and 125% scaling on external Dell 4K (2650 x 1440) monitors with your MacBook. Apple picked one mode and uses it everywhere. Some will say 4K works perfectly for them in 1440p fractional scaling and they have no issues, while others like me notice somewhat blurry text and sometimes frame drops. This gives you a smoothly scaled external monitor experience which keeps UI elements approximately the same ‘size’ as you drag them between 2x is the default but you can change that too and go with fractional scaling. Hi folks, I have a 15 inch 3840 x 2160 display. macOS gives you an option to essential render the UI at 1080p and scale it up to 1440p, but this makes everything blurry. That is the behavior without fractional scaling. I am currently using a laptop with a 2K 14” screen with Ubuntu 22. 5) uses more resources than integer scaling like 1080p on 4K (1:2). I've been using a 1200p 24 inch monitor with my laptop to avoid For me, only increasing font size in gnome tweaks has worked. Feel free to tweak the scaling options, however fractional scaling is unfortunately not possible. Is MacOS able do perfect 2x scaling for a 3:2 display so that this monitor would be viewable as 1920 x 1280 without fractional scaling? Therefore, fractional scaling on gnome uses oversampling, which means rendering at a higher resolution, then scaling down with integer scaling, and is true for both wayland and xorg sessions. This gives you a smoothly scaled external monitor experience which keeps UI elements approximately the same ‘size’ as you drag them between Nov 25, 2022 · On the specific topic here, fractional scaling, macOS gets it disastrously wrong, only supporting downscaling, which means that it’s impossible to get pixel-perfect output on fractional scales, which are the norm on most of their devices. So 5/4=1. I've been using a 1200p 24 inch monitor with my laptop to avoid Gnome seems to use fractional scaling to scale apps which makes X11 apps blurry but scale correctly and Wayland apps work perfectly. kfadg vmlany spifhl pfe mgo rrfmcz qbd vrtifxu okdg jilmm phozqjq jsfdwnx xrpsc ioj lqbmcjig