Retina Macbook Pro 1680x1050 Scale

[Stetrain]

It's not weird, Apple is downscaling a bigger workspace into the 2800x1800 screen.. A lot of people noticed this when taking screenshots, i'm not exactly sure why they are doing this though, I guess to give you the feeling of a screen of more than 2800x1800 pixels.. It makes retina more retina?

Rather than deal with the complexities of arbitrary DPI scaling (they actually tried that first and it just didn't work from a technical and developer support point of view), OSX apps now have two possible modes in which they need to render themselves: 1x and 2x. Just like in iOS.

So to achieve "pseudo-1920x1200" mode, it lets apps render in the 2x mode but sets the desktop area to 3840x2400. It then downscales to 2880x1800 for display. The results aren't perfect but they seem to be pretty good. Most people who have seen them first hand say it looks better than the native 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 panels.

It's completely different than setting an old MBP to a non-native resolution.

 

[d00d]

I had the same concern and went down the local Apple store to test the same thing and I was pleasantly surprised that the non-native resolutions looked almost as good to my admittedly imperfect eyes. I really started leaning towards the 1920x1200 though.

 

[gokart mozart]

Anandtech really does a good job of explaining how the scaling works, for those of you that are still confused.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling

Gizmodo also had an article written in extreme layman's terms, but I can't seem to find it. Assuming I don't feel any sort of eye strain, I think I'd use the 1920x1200. It looked very crisp when I toyed around with it at the store. Wasn't too impressed with the 1680x1050, relative to the native and the max. Didn't notice any blurriness with it, but I was more interested in looking at "retina" images on google rather than text.