MacBook resolution help please

[ChrisPowder]

Hi everyone

Just received my new MacBook yesterday, very pleased

I'm not particularly computer savvy and am a bit confused about resolutions. I do, however, understand screen estate and have read people saying they are changing their resolution for more screen estate.

This is where I get confused. Surely unless you have 1152x720 you won't get the hignest DPI (226).

So my question - what DPIs do the scaled resolutions give. I would like more room on screen, but I don't want to sacrifice the retina display too much.

Thanks

 

[zhenya]

The DPI of the screen is fixed at the screen level; it doesn't change when you change resolutions. 1152x720 is just the 1/4 resolution so that there is no heavy graphics processing required to keep a sharp image. It should be the sharpest with the least amount of hardware overhead. At the other resolutions the graphics card must render the content off-screen, then scale it to fit the size of the screen, and since it's not a perfect integer scaling, in theory it's not quite as sharp, and requires a bit of extra processing. In practice, I find the other resolutions to be acceptably sharp with little additional lag occurring, so choose the resolution that suits your needs best and forget about it.

 

[ChrisPowder]

The DPI of the screen is fixed at the screen level; it doesn't change when you change resolutions. 1152x720 is just the 1/4 resolution so that there is no heavy graphics processing required to keep a sharp image. It should be the sharpest with the least amount of hardware overhead. At the other resolutions the graphics card must render the content off-screen, then scale it to fit the size of the screen, and since it's not a perfect integer scaling, in theory it's not quite as sharp, and requires a bit of extra processing. In practice, I find the other resolutions to be acceptably sharp with little additional lag occurring, so choose the resolution that suits your needs best and forget about it.

OK great thanks

I've just noticed the default resolution is 1280x800 so it's obviously doing this out of the box.