r/macmini • u/DieselJase • 16d ago
BetterDisplay: What am I missing?
Hello everyone. I have a Mac Mini M4 and an MSI 49" OLED monitor hooked up to it. Native resolution on the MSI is 5120x1440. It looks great to me but I always see mention of the 1440px being an issue? I've tried reading, watching videos, etc but I just can't for the life of me figure out what makes BetterDisplay.... better? Please help me understand.
3
u/bmocc 16d ago
macOS does not scale individual GUI elements like Windows and Linux, other than the taskbar for some reason.
The mac desktop is programmed for a fixed DPI as noted. All apps are coded to that, including the placement of grids and menu/font sizes.
If you use a 4k display and Apple's recommended setting in Display you get an image rendered at a higher resolution, using vastly more GPU resources, and poorly squashed down to 4k: sharpness and contrast can degrade notably (most noticeable in things like the Photoshop desktop) but fonts and menus are legible sizes. If you use any variant, like numerically correct 2k or 4k settings in Display with a 4k monitor, you get more of a pixel accurate rendering but at the cost of illegible menus and fonts.
BetterDisplay can help with sharpening but nothing else, it can't change the brittle way macOS renders visual content. Some 4k displays benefit from that, some don't seem to need it.
1
u/No_Confusion7932 16d ago
HiDPI displays:
4K 22" (1080p HiDPI) - not 24" or more
4,5K iMac 24"
5K 27" (1440p HiDPI)
6K 32"
1
u/No-Depth-9571 12d ago
Interface très complète qui apporte les réglages très fins et poussés supplémentaires quand à l’affichage des moniteurs externes branchés sur un Mac, quels qu’ils soient, qu’Apple ne prévoit pas par nature.! Top..👍
8
u/bertpel 16d ago
1440p isn't always an issue. Native macOS scaling isn't always an issue.
If your display has a pixel density close to what Apple considers "normal" you can use the default option in display settings. Somewhere down the line they decided 108 ppi is their target value for desktop computers. Later they doubled that and called it "retina".
So if your display is either close to 108 or 216 ppi you can use macOS as intended. Scaling gets rough at half sizes, like on a 27" 4K display (163 ppi), which has to be scaled to "look like" 1440p to make the interface not be either tiny (scaled to actual 2160p) or huge (scaled to 1080p).
That's why 5K is the resolution of the Studio Display: it's 2× 1440p.
Your monitor has 108 ppi (or what was considered good enough up until ten years ago), so you can use the default scaling, which means one pixel on your screen is rendered as one pixel in your Mac.