HiDPI on 1080P Monitor

[flyingatm]

Hello there!

Thank you for your hard work! My question is, I'm totally new to hidpi thing. I have a Philips 24" 1920x1080P monitor and
blurry text cries my eyes. I downloaded betterdummy to reach hidpi on my macbook air m1.

The thing is, what's the resulation for 1080P to get hidpi? Is it 960x540? Because only resulations that I get a sharp and smooth display is 960x540 and below resulations. If yes, what can I do for huge menu bar and other huge things after using 960x540? Because everything is so big on my screen and really hard to work with.

Thanks!

[crimue]

Hey, after you have created your dummy display with BetterDummy you should be able to select your normal 1920x1080 resolution (see screenshot) but without the "(low resolution)" on the dummy display. After that select your external display and mirror the content of the dummy display to it :)

[flyingatm]

hello! thank you for your fast answer but this is not I'm asking for actually. Yes, I'm able to select 1920x1080 without (low resolution). But texts are still blurry, look like there is no "hidpi" that makes my texts looks better. But when I select half of my maximum res. (960x540) everything is crystal clear.

I wanted to ask can I use 1920x1080 with crystal clear texts like in 960x540?

[waydabber]

Hi @flyingatm - unfortunately the app is not able to add additional physical pixels to the 1080p displays to increase clarity and also does not enable subpixel rendering for texts (Apple removed this feature from macOS a while back) like Windows has. So in your case, the app has only some limited benefits I think.

[waydabber]

Hi @flyingatm,

also please be aware of the fact that 1080p displays are rather low resolution by default so creating a HiDPI 1080p display in order to mirror it to the 1080p display will not result in a significantly better (if at all) image. The only real benefit would be if you used the Zoom functionality of MacOS or want to create high resolution screenshots.

You might generally find macOS to look inferior (compared to Windows for example) on a 1080p display, which is related to font smoothing techniques (Windows uses something called ClearType - subpixel rendered font smoothing - which macOS stopped using - precisely because of the advent of scaled resolutions on the Mac) a while ago. There is no real fix for that unfortunately.

Hope this clarifies things!