Blurry 1440p resolution on a 4K display with MacBook Neo

[HouseLannister]

FWIW, I do 1440p gaming on my 4K monitor on a Windows box and that is equally blurry when outside of games.
I recommend you just buy a 1440p monitor if that is your ideal. They are plentiful and cheap.

 

[AppleTO]

Someone had posted something regarding this a while ago. If I remember correctly, the max resolution the Neo can render is 3840x2160. In order to HiDPI a scale of 2560x1440, it would need to render it at 2x (5120 x 2880), and then scale it down for the display. But, it can't render 5120 x 2880, so you can't get the crisp image other Macs can do.

 

[sblemmy]

At work, I use a LG StanbyME 2 in my 1:1 meetings, which is a 1440p display. I used to have a mid/high Windows gaming laptop connected to it, and it looked great. Now I'm using the MacBook Neo, and everything is blurrier. I thought it was me, but seeing this thread has assured me I'm not seeing things.

 

[Heelpir8]

I think what’s happening is that the MacBook Air and Mac mini are rendering the 1440p scaling as 2880p internally, and downscale that to 4K for the monitor, resulting in a still relatively sharp image. The MacBook Neo, on the other hand, doesn’t have the capability to render 2880p (5K), hence only renders that scaling as 1440p internally, which becomes quite blurry when upscaled to 4K.

I think this is the first real answer. macOS renders larger than your screen resolution. Sounds like the Neo doesn’t have the performance to do this.

Out of curiosity, do we know whether the A19 Pro in a MacBook Neo 2 might be able to render 1440p scaling as 2880p internally? Maybe that capability is exclusive to the M-series chips or depends on whether any GPU cores are disabled?