4k external display resolution preference

[GustavPicora]

Hell all,

I recently got a new tMBP 15'' 455 Raedon and with it a Dell P2415Q. I have it connected and its WOW. for a couple of weeks I used at scaled res of 2560 x 1400 and it looked good, some blurred text. Then this week I have been used standard res for the 4k external display and the text looks crystal clear, but well its big :S.

As a personal opinion, what are your preferences and why? I use my computer for Photography and XCode development mainly. From time to time SC2.

Thx
G

 

[mctrials23]

I have the ultrafine 4k and I use it at native scaled res which is quite large but its a little better than most 4k displays because its true 4k so 4096x2304 and its only a 21.5" screen. I am running two of them though and performance is noticeably poor when you run a scaled resolution otherwise I would probably run them at 1440p.

 

[GustavPicora]

I have the ultrafine 4k and I use it at native scaled res which is quite large but its a little better than most 4k displays because its true 4k so 4096x2304 and its only a 21.5" screen. I am running two of them though and performance is noticeably poor when you run a scaled resolution otherwise I would probably run them at 1440p.

Thanks for the info.
Whats the default res macOS gives you for your display 1440p?
g

 

[mctrials23]

Default res is 2048x1152 whereas on almost every other "4k" display it will be 1920x1080.

Resolutions that are not exact devisions of the native resolution incur a heavy processing penalty which is fine if you have a super powerful GPU or only a single display but with 2 of them on a 13" tbMBP thats just not realistic.

 

[d14b0ll0s]

Default res is 2048x1152 whereas on almost every other "4k" display it will be 1920x1080.

Resolutions that are not exact devisions of the native resolution incur a heavy processing penalty which is fine if you have a super powerful GPU or only a single display but with 2 of them on a 13" tbMBP thats just not realistic.

I disagree. I currently have a 27" 4K screen (LG 27UD88-W) and a 25" 1440p screen (Dell U2515H) connected to my 13" MBP TB. The first is running in the 2048x1152 HiDPI mode (the default one was FHD actually), while the second one in the custom-set 1920x1080 HiDPI via SwitchResX, and they're not only running fine – everything is literally flying, despite what others have said about laggy interface etc. For some reason things actually seem to be opening faster than on MBP's internal screen but this may be an illusion. At any rate, I'm definitely going to swap the 1440p monitor for a second 4K one in a couple of months from now, and I intend to run them in one of the HiDPI modes. The 4x scaling vs all the others does not to be such a strain on modern GPUs, you can check various threads on this here.

 

[Amigaman]

I prefer to run my BenQ 4k display at 1920x1080 (1440p).

 

[MrX8503]

The preferred "retina" screen size and resolution is 21" 4k or 27" 5k. This allows you to run it at 2X with "normal" sized assets. Any other screen size and you'll have in between scaling or somewhat large assets at 2X scaling.

If the text isn't too small, I would run it as 1440p