Help with 4K Displays on OSX in 2025!?

[Dorfdad]

So Maybe Im missing something but I recently bought a 4K MSI display for gaming / work / TV and I connected it to my M4 MacBook Pro and was immediately disappointed in how OSX seems to handle 4K. Hopefully Im doing something wrong and someone can show me the error in my ways.

So when I hooked up the Montor and enabled 4K everything was entirely too small for me to read / use. So no problem I thought Id just scale the interface size like 150/200% like I always did in windows... Wait what there is no calling in OSX!??

So I read ok go to the display settings and change the resolution to 1440p. I did and it works Nice / but wait all my games (Geforce Now) etc only recognize my Display now as a 1440p display and oh HDR is disabled and not to be seen in the settings now. SO I change to show all resolutions and now I see a LOW version of 1440p and wow it enables 1440p HDR. Ok nice but the reason I bought the 4K display was for the size 32 inch and 4K HDR but I'm basically forcing OSX into 1440p mode.

So Im wondering from users is there a way to let me scale / enlarge the icons / menus / text etc to a 1440p size but keep 4K monitor settings so mu 4K apps will actually see the monitor as 4K or am I just SOL.

Is there a way to keep the desktop SDR 1440p but when I launch specific applications for the resolution to switch to 4k/HDR etc automatically?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[joevt]

The high resolution 1440p mode is actually drawing into a 5K framebuffer which is scaled down for output to 4K.
The low resolution 1440p mode draws into a 1440p framebuffer which is scaled up for output to 4K (unless it is not a scaled mode in which case the display will do the scaling to 4K).
Try the high resolution 1080p mode which draws into a 4K framebuffer and there's no scaling to the output.

See if BetterDisplay has the features you want.

 

[Dorfdad]

Would the 1080p mode be the low or standard? And would my apps accept or see the 3840 setting as it is now if I drop resolution that apps max to 1080p also

 

[joevt]

Would the 1080p mode be the low or standard? And would my apps accept or see the 3840 setting as it is now if I drop resolution that apps max to 1080p also

standard. It should appear as HiDPI in BetterDisplay or SwitchResX.

It probably depends on the app. The apps should render at 4K while having UI elements sized the same as what you would see on a 1080p display.

Games should render at 4K and they should have an option to change the UI element sizing. For increased performance, you may have the game render fewer pixels.

 

[Dorfdad]

Appreciate it just seems counter intuitive to me but it’s showing 1080p on tv and the app does show ability to go to 3840x2160 so I’ll give it a go! Thanks