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Something thats always confused me with screen resolution...

jakesaunders27

jakesaunders27

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 23, 2012
907
6
United Kingdom
Hi all, I have an 11 inch air, and obviously due to the amount of pixels in my screen it can't go any higher but why when I remote desktop to the 27" iMac in our house it looks perfect and sharp? But when i use something like switchresx the screen looks rubbish at any higher resolution?

Can someone explain this to me.

Thanks
 
Remove the "but":

when i use something like switchresx the screen looks rubbish at any higher resolution
Click to expand...

"something like switchresx" is just a bad idea.

Your screen has a fixed hardware resolution. If you don't match the hardware resolution, it's going to look like crap. Period.
 
jakesaunders27 said:
Hi all, I have an 11 inch air, and obviously due to the amount of pixels in my screen it can't go any higher but why when I remote desktop to the 27" iMac in our house it looks perfect and sharp? But when i use something like switchresx the screen looks rubbish at any higher resolution?

Can someone explain this to me.

Thanks
Click to expand...

It sounds like you are assuming that your MBA can only display 1136x768 pixels, whether it is on your screen or on the external monitor. At the same time, you are making the exact opposite assumption, that the MBA screen can display more than 1136x768.

So for the first issue, the misconception here is that GPU-->screen-->monitor, when the path it takes is actually GPU-->monitor. It may be best to imagine your MBA has no screen, and instead only has the 2560x1440 iMac display. There is no reason the hardware would tell the monitor to display 1136x768 resolution.

For your second problem, how crisp your screen looks is dependent upon the amount of pixels. When you use switchresx on your MBA, you are telling it to display more pixels than it actually has, so if you made it display 2560x1440, about 75% of the pixels wouldn't show up, just because your screen doesn't have them. This makes it look really bad because whole chunks of the screen are missing. What this does is make everything smaller AND lower resolution.

Hopefully that helps.

Best,
Matt
 
mad3inch1na said:
It sounds like you are assuming that your MBA can only display 1136x768 pixels, whether it is on your screen or on the external monitor. At the same time, you are making the exact opposite assumption, that the MBA screen can display more than 1136x768.

So for the first issue, the misconception here is that GPU-->screen-->monitor, when the path it takes is actually GPU-->monitor. It may be best to imagine your MBA has no screen, and instead only has the 2560x1440 iMac display. There is no reason the hardware would tell the monitor to display 1136x768 resolution.

For your second problem, how crisp your screen looks is dependent upon the amount of pixels. When you use switchresx on your MBA, you are telling it to display more pixels than it actually has, so if you made it display 2560x1440, about 75% of the pixels wouldn't show up, just because your screen doesn't have them. This makes it look really bad because whole chunks of the screen are missing. What this does is make everything smaller AND lower resolution.

Hopefully that helps.

Best,
Matt
Click to expand...

That's cleared things up I understand now! Thanks a lot Matt.
 
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