Blurry rendering of games on Mac

https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/your-mac-game-is-probably-rendering-blurry/

by bangonkeyboard • 11 months ago

453 312 11 months ago

reactordev3• 11 months ago

Oh it’s not just Apple…

This was an issue I also discovered on Xbox 360 in 2008. TV’s have overscan and depending on that setting, your resolutions will be off.

However, at the time, we couldn’t create render targets that matched the overscan safe area. XNA added a Screen SafeArea rect to help guide people but it was still an issue that you had to consciously develop for.

Now, we can create any back buffer size we want. It’s best to create one 1:1 or use DLSS with a target of 1:1 to the safe area for best results. I’m glad the author went and reported it but ultimately it’s up to developers to know Screen Resolution != Render Resolution.

Anyone using wgpu/vulkan/AppKit/SDL/glfw/etc need to know this.

DaiPlusPlus5• 11 months ago

If I understood you correctly... you wanted to be able to render to a slightly smaller surface to avoid wasting graphics compute time, but that's still going to be upscaled to 1080 for the HDMI scanout, and then mangled again by TVs' overscan - which to me feels like introducing more problems more severe than whatever problem you were trying to solve in the first place.

(Besides, TV overscan is a solved problem: instead of specifically rendering a smaller frame games should let users set a custom FoV and custom HUD/GUI size - thus solving 3 problems at once without having to compromise anything).

rustystump2• 11 months ago

Read up on g buffer and deferred rendering. Usually one doesnt do everything at full resolution until the final output and even then it is often better these days to have fancy upscaling.

Many games do let users set the things you mention but it is not always so simple. For example, handling rounded edges and notches is a huge pain.

reactordev3• 11 months ago

No, Your TV says it’s 1080 but it’s not, it’s 1074… This is a solved issue now but it wasn’t when HDMI was first introduced. The Xbox 360 suffered from red rings of death. Microsoft hated Linux. And C# was cool.

Basically, if you rendered an avatar image in the top left of the screen, perfectly placed on your monitor, on the TV its head would be cut off. So you change to safe area resolution and it’s perfect again (but on your monitor safe area and screen resolution are the same, except Apple apparently). Make sense?

You can see how if your screen says it’s 4k, but really it’s short 40 pixels, you render at 4k - the screen will shrink it by 40 pixels and introduce nasty pixel artifacts. TV overscan goes the other way. Interesting find by the author about the notch.

AndriyKunitsyn• 11 months ago

Which says more about the volume of the market of gaming on Mac. It's small and unfortunate.

diath• 11 months ago

It's actually really small, according to Steam Hardware Survey, Macs are only 1.88% of Steam users, which is less than that of Linux, which is probably why most developers don't care.

zamadatix5• 11 months ago

Between the deprecation and stagnation of OpenGL on the platform, the removal of 32 bit support completely, the refusal to natively support Vulkan in favor of Metal, and the switch to ARM based systems... I can't believe it's still that "high".

add-sub-mul-div• 11 months ago

It would be smaller than that overall because Steam stats are incomplete, they don't count all the Game Pass users. I haven't opened Steam in the six or so years I've been taking advantage of Microsoft providing a few hundred games for $10/month.

egypturnash• 11 months ago

I do my work on a Mac. I game on a game machine. Which right now is a Steam Deck. In the past it's been PS4, 360, Gamecube, PS2, etc.

I think the only game I've put serious time into on my Mac was Hades 1, which I pretty much finished before the console ports happened.

vlovich123• 11 months ago

Mac users might prefer to get their games through the default Mac App Store than Steam for distribution which plausibly could unrealistically distort the numbers.

swah• 11 months ago

Does Linux include SteamDeck here?

lilyball5• 11 months ago

It's worth noting that the percentage of Steam users that are Mac users is not going to be equal to the percentage of gamers who play games on Macs, because not only is Steam not the only distribution channel for games on Mac, it's always been a fairly poor UX there, so bad I don't usually even bother installing it on my Macs anymore. Steam sees me as a Linux user as I have a Steam Deck, but I spend more time playing non-Steam games on my Mac than I do using that.

Actually, I think the last time I installed Steam on a Mac I did so in a CrossOver Games bottle, so even there Steam would have seen that install as a non-Mac user.

EDIT: Also just because I think it's interesting to note this, Steam Deck accounts for most of Linux's headroom there, if you subtract the SteamOS numbers from the rest of Linux it's at 2.07% instead, which is much closer to Mac.

zamadatix5• 11 months ago

Also consider setting NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode and just leave self letterboxing control to a toggle in the settings (with whatever default you prefer).

mushufasa• 11 months ago

interesting -- I ran into this recently playing baldur gate 3 and was curious the technical details why. my fix was that I had an external monitor and I just reset the resolution to the external monitor. (by default, though, the monitor was showing up blurry though; with the wrong aspect ratio.)

freehorse4• 11 months ago

Baldur's gate 3 groups the resolutions by aspect ratio. I assume it probably queries the resolutions, computes the aspect ratios and then displays them grouped them by it. This results in some weirdness with some weird ratios with huge coprime numerators/denominators but, as long as the right resolution is detected somewhere, you only basically need to do is select the right aspect ration for your screen.

andrewmcwatters• 11 months ago

Yes!

I remember first implementing this in Planimeter Game Engine 2D, we got a massive resolution list from SDL (through LÖVE, which is what we're built on).

If I remember correctly, we filtered the list ourselves by allowing users to explicitly select supported display ratios first, then showing the narrowed list from there. Not great. Technically there's a 683:384 ratio in there.[1]

But it did enough of the job that users who knew what resolution they wanted to pick in the first place didn't have to scroll a gargantuan list!

[1] https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d/blob/v9.0.1/eng...

ziml77• 11 months ago

Not mentioned about WoW in here is that they considered the notch enough to also have an option to have the UI avoid the notch. It calls a function in C_UI to get the safe region, and then resizes UIParent to fit within that region while still rendering the game up to the true top of the display.

pdpi2• 11 months ago

WoW has always been exceptionally good at treating macOS like a first-class citizen. It's a shame Blizzard has stopped supporting macOS for their newer games.

dontlaugh• 11 months ago

Perhaps one or two people on that team have always had personal macs.

cosmic_cheese2• 11 months ago

Back in the day they even implemented near-zero-performance-impact video recording that leveraged AVKit/Quicktime as a Mac-exclusive feature, which was pretty neat. It let me get silky recordings where Windows user guildmates’ videos skipped and stuttered from having to run both WoW and much heavier third party recording software.

rarepostinlurkr2• 11 months ago

If anything it's an example that games can be amazing on macOS, if developers take the time to learn and use the system. WoW on macOS is a far superior experience to WoW on Windows.

bigyabai2• 11 months ago

Bullshit like this is probably why they sent their developers to farm greener pastures.

endemic• 11 months ago

Always loved Blizzard games back in the day because I could play with my Mac-owning friends.

behnamoh3• 11 months ago

This just shows how little Apple cares about gaming on Mac. It's so sad that I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices (MBP, M Studio, etc.) only to be bottlenecked not by hardware, but by Apple's shitty approach to gaming software.

I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts.

We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true until today: "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons."

iwontberude• 11 months ago

to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so

gchamonlive2• 11 months ago

Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders.

Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially indie ones. Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market.

semiquaver• 11 months ago

100W TDP ought to be enough for anyone.

jsheard• 11 months ago

The Xbox Series S only uses about 80w under full load, and that's built on TSMCs old 7nm process. Apple's bleeding edge 3nm silicon should be able to do even more with a similar power envelope.

wlesieutre• 11 months ago

I think their bigger problem is there's shit for documentation. You get a big list of function signatures and if you actually want to know how you're supposed to use anything you find the WWDC session from 4 years ago and hope it's still accurate.

xcf_seetan• 11 months ago

Somebody told me that the quality of a company is directly proportional to the quality of its documentation...

internetter3• 11 months ago

A WWDC session, I might add, with a mildly relevant title and rarely a hyperlink from the relevant documentation, let alone a timestamp.

grishka2• 11 months ago

But if you find anything with the dark-blue "documentation archive" header, then you know it's some good stuff. Though sometimes outdated.

saagarjha• 11 months ago

Most of this stuff uses APIs greater than four years old, so you're probably not getting those videos unless you look at third party rehosts.

trinix9123• 11 months ago

What's even worse is they used to have great documentation, then for some nonsense reason archived it and replaced it with this wannabe JavaDocs crap with vague function explanations that leave more questions open than they resolve.

They now tell people to watch WWDC videos as if those relatively short videos contained the same amount of information a proper API documentation does.

whstl• 11 months ago

I can attest to that. I used to freelance doing porting about 10 years ago, and the main way of having a stable event loop for a game on macOS is not really anywhere clear in the documentation, at least not anywhere I could find.

Libraries and SDL, GLFW and Sokol handle this for you, and I had to poke inside them to actually figure out how to get the same performance of other games.

In a nutshell, the trick is simple, you call [NSApplication finishLaunching] and do a while-loop yourself instead of calling [NSApplication run].

latexr4• 11 months ago

I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts.

Why would Apple be deliberately sabotaging the experience? They would gain nothing from it. That argument makes even less sense when you consider most of the games mentioned in the article are on the Mac App Store, Apple can take their cut.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/control-ultimate-edition/id650...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider/id14...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riven/id1437437535

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate/id6633...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray/id6451498949

This is an obvious case of Hanlon’s Razor. Anyone who develops for Apple platforms and has had to file Feedbacks is aware of Apple’s incompetence and lack of care.

goosedragons2• 11 months ago

Except for the handful of Mac ports exclusive to the Mac App Store, who with a lick of sense would choose to buy from there? Steam, GoG and Epic are all more feature rich, have more often sales/3rd party resellers and throw in the PC version too.

On iOS there is no choice.

mvdtnz• 11 months ago

I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices

I mean... yeah why would they change?

eru5• 11 months ago

Generally, if you lower prices you can sell more volume.

The profit maximising trade-off for Apple might however be where they are right now. Not sure.

whateveracct2• 11 months ago

It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer.

lostlogin5• 11 months ago

I just replaced a nuc 9 ghost canyon with a Mac mini.

The difference in power consumption is insane. Nuc was 67 watts. The mini is 4-10. I don’t have enough data for a long term average on the mini yet, but it’s ludicrously efficient.

DaiPlusPlus5• 11 months ago

It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer

Well, Apple doesn't sell 'em with RGB LEDs built-in, so I dunno.

...more seriously though: I don't know how you can say that with a straight-face. On paper, the Apple Silicon M3 and M4 seem comparable to NVIDIA's mid-tier offerings from 3-4 years ago... when rendering to a 1080p-sized display; assuming you'd like to render your games at native Retina or even 5K resolution (given that Apple would really rather you used their display hardware for the best experience, right?) then you'll have to limit yourself to games from the last decade (assuming they've even been ported to macOS in the first place) or convince yourself that this year's AAA titles are fully playable as a slideshow.

...and that's assuming your Mac doesn't start thermal-throttling itself too.

Also, you'll also need a very non-Apple mouse: I'm flabbergasted by how even still in 2025 you cannot independently left-click and right-click on Apple's Magic Mouse[1]; while, ergonomically a multitouch mouse is great for many things, but navigating a wheel-driven UI (e.g. weapon-wheels) is not one of them.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/188431/apples-magic-mouse-an...

makeitdouble4• 11 months ago

They sure don't care about games on Mac, but I think this specific issue is more due to trying to do "magic" for better or worse.

Introducing the notch creates this "here but not really usable" area that is specific to some displays, and Apple touts it as something that will just work thanks to their software layer.

Yet every app has to deal with it one way or another and most apps that care about screen estate or resolution will need hacks.

It will be the same for every feature that pushes the boundaries and offers an abstraction layer as an answer to how the issues will be solved.

mort962• 11 months ago

No, every app does not need to deal with it, at least in principle. Apple could literally have provided a resolution list which only covers the 16:10 resolutions which aren't covered by the notch, and then games literally wouldn't have known that they were running on a machine with a notch.

The problem here is 100% that Apple, for some reason, provides both 16:10 "safe" resolutions and the actual whole screen resolutions. All those non-16:10 resolutions are a trap, because they cause the compositor to downscale the window to fit below the notch anyway -- they serve literally no point. There is no situation where a user would want a window that's 16:10.39 or whatever and then downscaled to fit within the bounds of the 16:10 safe area, so there is no reason to provide those 16:10.39 resolutions in the list of display modes.

Apple botched the implementation, but the hardware would've been perfectly reasonable and caused no issues or complexities for either users or developers if Apple hadn't botched the software.

nativeit• 11 months ago

I don’t try to game on my laptop, and I have always thought “gaming laptops” are somewhat akin to “racing-spec BarcaLoungers”. That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC.

White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac. They aren’t like matter and antimatter, you won’t collapse the galaxy or anything.

wyre• 11 months ago

Valid and correct take, but I don’t want to own a Mac and a PC. I’d like to be able to run casual games on my MacBook. I don’t game often or heavily enough to warrant purchasing a rig for it.

chickenzzzzu• 11 months ago

White-hot take: you are allowed to own an outhouse and a urine only toilet. They aren't like matter and antimatter, and so on.

Fade_Dance2• 11 months ago

That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs.

Well that's where you're wrong then. It's perfectly possible to game on a laptop. Over the last decade with the development of the lightning ecosystem and docks it's become a very low friction endeavor as well.

There are a myriad of quality "gaming" laptops out there, but obviously that's not for everybody, and that's one of many reasons why workstation laptops exist (basically the same thing - ability to run at high loads for extended periods of time - without the gamer aesthetic).

There are many casual gamers out there who don't want to shell out for a dedicated gaming device, nor should they win a laptop is a perfectly adequate device to game on. It's not that hard to comprehend.

makeitdouble4• 11 months ago

If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC.

Push this logic one or two notches further and people should write and build code on desktop only with an e-ink portrait monitor.

Specialization has its place but asking a generic computing device to gracefully handle most applications isn't a big ask IMHO.

They're not running the latest top notch games or anything exotic, it should be fine with no tinkering.

freehorse4• 11 months ago

People are complaining because the hardware is capable but there are other reasons may make gaming on a mac an annoyance. Not because macbooks are not powerful enough to run games. And to be fair, macbooks can perfectly run games, and indeed a lot of titles perform great, even if most have to use some sort of compatibility layer (roseta 2, vulkan to metal etc). Why should I get a PC just for gaming if my machine can handle that? Especially something like a big form factor gaming PC that takes quite a bit of space in a room.

And this is not a matter of laptop vs desktop because most of these issues (not the notch) will be present for a mac studio.

In fact apple itself has started advertising gaming in macs in WWDCs last years. So it is only fair that people will complain about it.

But in general gaming in macs is perfectly feasible (maybe not the latest most demanding graphics game at max settings, but most of the stuff). You may miss certain graphics features that may not be available for macs, but otherwise performance is not bad. Even playing windows versions of games through whisky or CrossOver is perfectly feasible.

eru5• 11 months ago

Different people have different trade-offs. Some people like the laptop form factor and want to game on it.

Just like people like the hand held form factor of the Nintendo Switch, but it's still entirely fine for them to complain about the system's low specs. Especially when the Steam Deck and the Rog Ally show that you can do better.

latexr4• 11 months ago

Not everyone has the extra money or space to spend on another device just to play games from time to time. I don’t even own a TV, I’m not going to get one, plus a console, plus rearrange my living room and get new furniture to house them, to play games occasionally. Nor will I buy an extra expensive, bulky, and noisy desktop machine and monitor, plus (again) rearrange my furniture.

Additionally, laptops are more than capable of playing demanding games these days.

nottorp4• 11 months ago

If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC.
White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac.

I do own a console, a pc and two macs. But for what I've paid for the macs Apple should make it easy for me to play games on their hardware if i so choose.

There is some hope: Lies of P is actually very playable on the minimum requirements M2/16G ram. And you get the Mac version on Steam with the Windows version so you're not limited to a single platform.

Razengan2• 11 months ago

What? This seems like just games not defaulting to the correct resolution for the display they're on. The first thing I do in every game I play (on any platform) is go through the settings, and make sure the resolution matches the screen's physical resolution. If the game is dumb about it, I choose a smaller multiple or run in windowed mode or on an external display.

eru5• 11 months ago

We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true until today: "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons."

That's more of an aspiration than a statement of fact.

Eg I'd happily have organised a crowdfunding to give Vladimir Putin a few dozen billion dollars to bribe him away from starting a war. And if you look at Russia's finances that's effectively what happened: he (and even more his oligarchs) predictably lost untold billions in revenue and profit for this war.

Also, migration from poor to rich countries increases workers' pay so much, that you could charge them a hefty sum for the privilege and they would still benefit from coming. However voters by and large don't like it, even if you were to distribute the proceeds amongst them (as a "citizen's dividend" or whatever).

They have non-monetary reasons.

See https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... for an interesting collection of historical cases drawn from such diverse sources as Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa, Malaysia, Nazi Germany.

TechSquidTV• 11 months ago

Im on an M3 Ultra Mac Studio. A $4K computer. And I'm not sure why but if I try to stream anything on StreamLabs (even with no game open), the recording is laggy and choppy. I just don't understand how that's possible.

tbolt• 11 months ago

OBS works fine. StreamLabs could just be bad software.

daneel_w• 11 months ago

Streamlabs is crap on iOS, crap on macOS. As someone else mentioned, OBS works great. I've had no issues with it.

monkeyelite5• 11 months ago

"everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons."

There are countless other incentives as tangible as money including meaning, status, security, fame, etc.

If you spend time around people with money you will find they will happily trade it to achieve these.

What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.

behnamoh3• 11 months ago

What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.

What this "classism" mentality signals is your sense of superiority due to the amount of $ you have in a bank.

bowsamic2• 11 months ago

Which class does it signal to you?

Shorel• 11 months ago

Macs were bad for gaming long before the software Apple Store existed.

Steve Jobs was dismissive about gaming, even when PC gaming was on the rise, that's the reason.

troupo8• 11 months ago

Apple is institutionally incapable of understanding games. It started with Jobs who didn't like and didn't understand video games. and continues with the top brass [1]

Games with app purchases are just a lucky turn of events for Apple because they still don't understand what games are. Hence the "oh, we now have desktop-level graphics on iPhone" or some other drivel they pronounce from time to time at WWDC.

From time to time someone in the company manages to push something forward (see Game Porting Toolkit), but those remain very few and far in between.

[1] To be honest, I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS.

alpaca1282• 11 months ago

I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS.

I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore and people won't want to be "mousing around". If he actually believes that it says a lot about the way he interacts with computers. And how rarely he uses it outside of a quiet office.

singhrac• 11 months ago

I've always thought that the reason they don't care about gaming is because gaming has always been a race-to-the-bottom in margins business. Gamers care a lot about hardware in ways that make selling gaming PCs always very low margin (compared to enterprise or creative) (very few other customers know about RAM or SSD prices, famously Apple's bread-and-butter margin increaser).

MBCook2• 11 months ago

Interesting article, but I think the demonstration image isn’t doing its job. Neither side really looks good to me. They both look roughly the same.

bschwindHN• 11 months ago

Right? If it's vertically squashed, then at least draw the dividing line vertically so we can see a better difference! But yeah, both images seem like a janky rendering of an antialiased circle.

munificent• 11 months ago

The bottom left side is showing the circle with the artist-created rough texture that it's supposed to have. The top right shows that that edgy-but-sharp texture has been softened by anti-aliased.

Tepix• 11 months ago

Yeah but the difference isn't as stark as one would expect really.

TheJoeMan• 11 months ago

I’m disappointed none of the proposed fixes are for CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes to have the “first” option on the list be the BEST option, taking into account the notch. The author hinted that many games pick the first option, so rather than demanding all those publishers add new code, Apple could make the easy path the happy path.

thadk• 11 months ago

How's factorio?

chainwax• 11 months ago

I played all the way through Space Age on a M1 Macbook Air no problem.

TylerE• 11 months ago

Factorial had an excellent native arm port. It’s a model citizen

debugnik2• 11 months ago

But World of Warcraft is an older game using the legacy CoreGraphics display services full screen API. That API actually allows World of Warcraft to draw into the notch.

Not knowing much about Macs, I would have thought games were supposed to render full screen around the notch for immersion but respect the safe area for UI and gameplay. Are they supposed to leave a menu bar on macOS?

Control gets around the issue by just making up its own resolutions.

That's hilarious, I wonder if they had trouble enumerating resolutions and gave up or if they simply couldn't bother.

freehorse4• 11 months ago

Are they supposed to leave a menu bar on macOS?

Depends also how the specific game is implemented, but often that area is just black and inaccessible, as in you cannot even move the cursor there. It is as if the screen does not include the area above the notch anymore, ie how the screen would be if there was no notch, like the m1 air.

debugnik2• 11 months ago

Thanks for explaining! I see this is common then. If I'm understanding correctly the docs of NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode[1], this is supposed to be a compatibility mode that apps can opt-out of to behave like I expected, and can be force-disabled from Finder.

So I guess rendering around the notch is the intended experience, but devs don't seem to know or care enough to opt-out, and the bug here is that enumerating display resolutions doesn't take this compatibility mode into account.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

diebeforei485• 11 months ago

How can this be fixed without breaking existing software? Re-ordering the list?

shermantanktop• 11 months ago

They could do what Windows has done, and build OS code that checks if the running application is a known-legacy game, and lie to the game about various capabilities so that the game runs well and looks good.

Not sure how much of that is still around but it was rampant for many years and likely a key to Windows success in gaming.

cesarb• 11 months ago

They could do what Windows has done, and build OS code that checks if the running application is a known-legacy game, and lie to the game about various capabilities so that the game runs well and looks good.

Or, even simpler (and AFAIK modern Windows does that too): if the running application doesn't say in its application manifest "I'm a modern application which understands the new things from operating system versions A, B, C and features X, Y, Z", you know it's a legacy application and you can activate the relevant compatibility shims.

nixpulvis4• 11 months ago

The notch is such a wildly stupid idea I can't even begin with it. I actually kinda liked the direction they were going with the keyboard Touch Bar... but they killed that.

wahnfrieden2• 11 months ago

No it's not

frumplestlatz• 11 months ago

The notch grants more usable vertical physical pixels than you'd have otherwise, with the only "downside" being a small unusable area in the center where the camera/mic/other sensors are placed.

I put "downside" in quotes because the alternative is just not having those vertical pixels at all, and having the screen end below the sensors.

internetter3• 11 months ago

with the only "downside" being a small unusable area in the center where the camera/mic/other sensors are placed.

The notch is wider than need be. As far as I can tell the main reason is aesthetics. But I agree, it is better than nothing

Notch: Camera, ambient light sensor, and a camera status LED

Dynamic island: camera, infrared camera and flood illuminator, proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor... also half the width and height

nixpulvis4• 11 months ago

The problem is, by granting more vertical space in such a way that requires additional application logic to avoid overlaps, you've taken a sacred abstraction (the rectangular screen) and shattered it.

Most applications do not handle this well, and I'm willing to bet that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.

I can see the allure. If you're a default macOS user with the menu bar not set to slide up when not in use, that space nicely fits. Problem still remains for fullscreen apps though.

And it's not even really a hardware problem. Apple could fix this in software. Just make using the unsafe region an opt-in for developers instead of the default. You want to paint in the unsafe region, call NSAllowUnsafeRegionResolution(). Boom done. By default, when the menu bar isn't shown, expose a rectangle to the viewport.

emmelaich• 11 months ago

What's the alternative? A camera on top of the screen? Fragile, unless you could fold it away. Which would be another point of failure.

bigstrat20032• 11 months ago

A bezel would be far preferable to a notch.

account423• 11 months ago

Might be unthinkable to some, but an alternative could also be to have NO camera. People already have a phone with one if they really need it.

nixpulvis4• 11 months ago

The alternative is what literally every other laptop does and just has a rectangular screen. Put the camera outside please and thank you.

iPhones have the same problem. Ever played a fullscreen game and had part of the UI cut off into the notch or island. Yep, it's a problem.

pezezin3• 11 months ago

Am I the only one who finds screens with rounded corners and notches really stupid? We had to struggle for decades with CRTs and their funky geometry, and when we finally get displays with perfect geometry, we botch them again to make them look... cooler?

crazygringo4• 11 months ago

Don't think of notches as something stupid that takes away from screen area.

Think of them as something that allows the overall screen area to increase, as bevels shrink.

And then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. Like a square peg in a round hole.

Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear.

So it's kind of the best of all worlds. Bigger screen with round corners for actual work (the notch is not particularly objectionable in the menu bar), slightly smaller screen with rectangular corners for video (and games too I assume?).

mcdeltat2• 11 months ago

Is bevel size really so important when it's already measured in mm? Personally I like a bit of bevel because I don't want the screen going to the edge of the device. The edge of the device is for holding, not interaction.

eviks8• 11 months ago

then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded.

The rounded laptop corners is a similar design decision. And also it doesn't look weird to me at all compared to rounded corners for windows, especially when they introduce visible desktop garbage in those now-not-perfectly-covering-rectangles corner areas

troupo8• 11 months ago

The notch reduces the space available in the top menu bar. And since Apple is still incapable of creating a built-in Bartender-like functionality you end up with less space on screen.

It's an actual objective fact of life.

You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely working workarounds in software that don't cover even half of cases.

anonymoushn• 11 months ago

my menu icons are hiding behind the notch lol

incrudible• 11 months ago

First of all, you can not argue anyone out of thinking it looks stupid or ugly. That is a visceral subjective experience and the extra space or whatever does nothing to make up for it.

Now for the bezels, mind that an equidistant circle (or squircle) radius converges to zero. So to avoid having a large inner radius, avoid a large outer radius. The Macbook is not a tablet, you do not hold its corners in your hand.

However, at some point Apple must have decided that the squircle is its entire visual identity and that hard corners on the XY plane are bad. That creates design problems it would not otherwise have.

The fact that developers are led into the trap of not pixel matching to the display however just shows a lack of attention to detail.

pdpi2• 11 months ago

Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear.

Also, it's worth noting that notches are a hardware-specific. I haven't tried any of the MBAs with notches, but the MBPs have good-enough black levels that the notch just kind of vanishes into the black background when using full-screen apps.

bee_rider2• 11 months ago

Are the screens OLED? The phones are...

IMO the notch is pointless, but they need space for the front camera. With OLED they can just turn the pixels off when it suits the application and it becomes like a big bevel, which was the alternative anyway.

MBCook2• 11 months ago

Expected in the next year or two on the pros, but not yet.

buildbot• 11 months ago

My M1 MacBook Pro turns off the display & backlight that would show the notch as needed, for example right now in full screen Safari you could not tell there is a notch/menu bar area at all. It's actually just as good as it can be already. Free extra space!

Bezel not bevel FYI.

bigstrat20032• 11 months ago

Nope. I think they're incredibly stupid as well.

jama2113• 11 months ago

You realise you can use the largest rectangular section of the screen as a rectangular screen right? Play a video and you’ll see. It’s the best of both worlds

dlivingston2• 11 months ago

I've got a MacBook with a notch and I literally never notice it. That's a common sentiment among MacBook users, btw -- I very rarely seeing people complain about the notch. I'm sure there are some, but seems to be a minority.

bombcar• 11 months ago

You didn’t lose pixels to the notch, you gained pixels beside it!

bbrks• 11 months ago

I frequently notice when my menubar items overflow and get truncated behind the notch with no built-in way to actually see them!

You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch.

[1] https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/

userbinator6• 11 months ago

I've always preferred the look of non-antialiased fonts on an LCD for this reason - you can finally actually see the sharp square corners of a pixel, yet somehow many like the blurry smoothness of antialiasing to make the screen more like a CRT.

userbinator6• 11 months ago

Please explain why you disagree?

Findecanor• 11 months ago

I prefer text to be hinted and antialiased even in low resolutions on a CRT. The first time I saw this on BeOS in the 90s I thought it was a big step up. You get corners snapped to pixels without jagged lines in-between. However, hinting makes text wider or narrower depending on font size and resolution.

Apple chose not to have hinting so as to make the text more dimensionally accurate. That did look blurry ... so Apple then doubled the screen resolution.

AceJohnny2• 11 months ago

It goes deep.

obligatory: https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

jeffhuys3• 11 months ago

Menu bar is on top on mac. I see it as the top bevel becoming a screen, not taking away from any screen real estate, actually FREEING up space for apps. I never see the notch anyway because my wallpaper is black.

trinix9123• 11 months ago

Until you want to do something full screen, then it might be a glaring black rectangle on top of the screen. The way to do it properly is to hide the camera in the thin bezels or somewhere else (inside the LCD, are we there yet?). This is just a lazy solution that designers probably even thought seems iconic.

floppyd• 11 months ago

I don't have a notched laptop screen, but I do like rounded corners, makes screens feel just a little bit more natural. My MacBook is older and doesn't have rounded corners, but I got used to them so much that I ended up simulating them in software.

pezezin3• 11 months ago

More natural why? Paper doesn't (usually) have rounded corners and it looks pretty natural to me.

gwd• 11 months ago

Look, given current technology there are exactly three options:

1. Don't have a front-facing camera on your laptop. Your actual laptop screen can be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow, with no bevel.

2. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with no bevel. Your actual laptop screen is now square, but has to be 5mm shorter now. There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything.

3. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with a bevel. Now the actual laptop screen has a "dead space" in middle at the top, but can again be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow. There's a narrow strip at the top that can't be used for anything, but the area to the left and right of the bevel can.

(A number 4 would be to somehow have a front-facing camera that operates without needing to displace screen area. Not clear how this would work without some complicated mechanism to extend the camera out the top of the screen, which would come with its own problems.)

Now, the vast majority of the time, you're going to be using your Mac in a windowed environment, with menus on the left, indicators on the right, and absolutely nothing in the middle.

In the case of #2, this menu bar has to take real estate from the top of your shorter screen, meaning that your windows are all 5mm shorter. #3 allows the menu bar and indicators to take up that space which on #2 is completely dead, freeing up extra space for your actual applications.

And the key thing is this: For modern full-screen games, in #3, you (apparently) can't use the areas to the side of the bezel; but this is the same situation you're in in #2.

IOW, as another commenter has said: The bevel design doesn't take away screen in the middle; it adds screen space on the side of the bevel.

That said, the API here seems obviously mad: What's the point of giving you a resolution if it's going to silently resize it behind your back? It should either give you the resolution which it won't resize, or throw an error when you try to make one higher.

dvfjsdhgfv• 11 months ago

While I agree in general with your comment, a small nitpick on this:

There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything.

Well, it can - on mine I have a physical switch that allows me to block the lens, and it saved me a few times. (I just wish I had a similar one for the microphone.)

thesuitonym• 11 months ago

(A number 4 would be to somehow have a front-facing camera that operates without needing to displace screen area. Not clear how this would work without some complicated mechanism to extend the camera out the top of the screen, which would come with its own problems.)

I don't know, Lenovo figured it out, and it's no more ridiculous than Apple's solution. Their notch just goes the other way. It's actually a little bit better, because it gives me a space to put my thumb when I'm opening the laptop to, you know, use it.

Sometimes it seems to me like Apple engineers do not use Apple products, because if they did, there's no way we'd have problems like disappearing icons without a way to get them back (Hell, Windows has had this ability for DECADES, why can't Apple "invent" this technology?). We wouldn't have edge-to-edge glass screens which seem to exist solely to get fingerprints on the screen. We wouldn't have closed lids touching the keyboard, leaving weird patterns on the smudgy glass.

The only other option is that design at Apple is not driven by designers or engineers, but by executives who have no clue. And that's worse.

zchrykng• 11 months ago

See Lenovo's design here https://p4-ofp.static.pub/ShareResource/na/products/thinkpad...

kjkjadksj2• 11 months ago

Option 4 was redesigning a camera unit to be narrow along the whole width of the screen instead of dropping in an oem component that demands the notch.

When you look at the remaining bezel along with the camera unit, the lens is the same size. They really could have built a bezelless mac more or less if they only stretched out the components in that camera unit.

thescriptkiddie• 11 months ago

i'll pick option 1 every time. you can't make me but a computer with a camera in it

julik• 11 months ago

No, you are not the only one

simondotau• 11 months ago

For what it's worth, Macintosh had rounded corners since its inception in 1984. They were just bitmaps in the screen corners and still addressable by software (and even by the mouse cursor in any context) but this demonstrates an aesthetic heritage.

These software rounded corners disappeared in software when CRTs gave way to flat panels, but they are indisputably part of the Apple design aesthetic.

righthand5• 11 months ago

Nope. I’m right there with you. I can’t even use my laptop undocked because half my applications use the toolbar to store their icon. So I have to plug my laptop into my monitor just to see what is in my screen space.

I have no idea why people praise these laptops, for a cpu I guess. Their design is a joke and feels like a Playskool laptop toy.

At least when the old Apple forced “phablets” as the standard phone size they included a software work around for reaching the top of the screen.

Not adding a dropdown menu for the toolbar is brain dead.

mthoms2• 11 months ago

Yeah, it's annoying. Try:

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar

https://www.macbartender.com

I think there's a native solution (finally) coming in the next MacOS.

kjkjadksj2• 11 months ago

A lot of games don’t even support the notched resolution so you get business as usual. The ones that do let you chose this resolution as well.

tomkarho• 11 months ago

Suppose it comes down to psychology. I recall reading long time ago that rounded corners signal safety since they can't cut you so easily so we gravitate towards those shapes.

chris_wot• 11 months ago

In typical Apple fashion, they have ignored the feedback for several years. Nice work, Apple!

blackguardx• 11 months ago

I'm surprised this article focused solely on blurry rendering when mouse pointer location in "fullscreen" Mac games is also commonly affected by this bug or whatever we are calling it. You have to dive into an OS menu for each game to tell it to render fullscreen below the notch to fix it. It should be a global accessibility setting but isn't for some reason.

int0x29• 11 months ago

The font this website uses is too thin for parts of a number of letters.

rendaw• 11 months ago

Yeah, IMO the tops on all the letters are too thin. Reading it I felt like I was reading something printed when the ink was running out...

(Upholding HN tradition here)

sira04• 11 months ago

League of Legends in borderless mode renders at the resolution that's set in BetterDisplay instead of the real one which makes it very blurry. In fullscreen it does it correctly so I'm forced to use fullscreen.

eviks8• 11 months ago

through NSScreen’s safeAreaInsets

How is vague "safety" is better than a simple descriptive rect_below_notch?

interpol_p• 11 months ago

Safe area can account for things that are not just a notch. It's used across Apple platforms to indicate anything that might need to occupy a dedicated region on the screen: notch on iPhones, home indicator, iPadOS traffic light buttons, menu bar, curved edges of displays, and so on

Your container views can extend the safe areas for their children as well. In our apps, which allow users to run their own custom projects, we increase the safe area for our UI so that users can avoid it in their own rendering

Safe area is a fairly neat and functional API. The unfortunate thing is the older `CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes` API is just lumping all resolutions together

eviks8• 11 months ago

Even then, you can still have something descriptive like unobstructed_area for more general cases. "Safety" is too generic

But also you don't need to degrade Mac dev experience for games to tackle ipads the games will not be developed on, aliases exist

zerocrates• 11 months ago

"Safe area" is terminology that has a history of being used with displays: defining the portion of a TV screen where viewers could be reliably expected to be able to see content and on-screen graphics without them getting clipped off by the overscan.

I assume they also wanted to choose something that would still be named appropriately if they had other kinds of notches or things in the future (and that even now it already accounts for, say, the curved corners where things also can't display).

eviks8• 11 months ago

Since "no-one" knows the history, the design go back to prioritizing the basics of comprehension

dagmx3• 11 months ago

Safe area is an industry wide term for the “safe area to display in”. It means that it’s a high probability of being safe to have important content there, not that it is a safe guarantee.

Your suggestion here and in the responses would be bucking industry standard terminology for content creation.

Your suggestion for unobstructed area is also incorrect because you cannot guarantee it’s unobstructed depending on the display it’s on. Different displays and configurations might have differing levels of overscan causing content to be clipped.

eviks8• 11 months ago

Of course it's correct, even Apple says so only using a different synonym unobscured https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsscreen/sa...

The distances from the screen’s edges at which content isn’t obscured.
because you cannot guarantee

That's a condition you've added without justification. Nothing in the term requires it. The term's core benefit is that it's more clarity. Nothing more (in terms of extra guarantees), but nothing less.

But also, you can guarantee, read the API docs again:

Content in the safe area is guaranteed to be unobscured

Like,

“safe area to display in”.

So it's not a "safe area", it's a "potentially a safe area"

bucking industry standard terminology

yes, bad standards should be bucked, preferably before they become standards, but the next best time is immediately after that or any time later.

musicale• 11 months ago

The problem with Apple laptops is they have a notch at the top of the display

Well, yes.

carstenhag• 11 months ago

Meta: the name on HN was "Blurry game rendering on Mac" or something. Now we have the same title as in the article - clickbait-sounding. Why?

JelteF• 11 months ago

It's kinda funny that an article complaining about blurry rendering, is written using one of the most illegible fonts I've ever seen.

Rob_Polding• 11 months ago

It’s a good thing that most people don’t buy Macs for gaming, as they suck compared to any other platform. Anyone who expects a good experience is fooling themselves as they won’t get it! If you want to experience games as the developer intends, don’t play ports that use compatibility layers, just buy a console and play natively!

liminal-dev• 11 months ago

The Steam Deck runs games on a compatibility layer (Wine) and it’s an excellent console.

Toutouxc• 11 months ago

I’m pretty sure that if a developer releases their game on macOS, it plays, by definition, as the developer intended.

I have both a powerful gaming PC with Windows and all that, and a PS5, but some games I just like on my MacBook.

extraisland2• 11 months ago

A lot of games are ported to Mac / Linux by a third party. The quality of that port is dependant on the company and the budget for porting it. If I was a game developers I would never do a Mac port.

esperent• 11 months ago

If you want to experience games as the developer intends, don’t play ports that use compatibility layers

A few months ago I would have assumed you're correct.

But recently I've played some games on my laptop with Lutris on Ubuntu which uses Wine or Proton under the hood.

The performance and stability is excellent. Although I haven't done any testing, subjectively it feels superior or at least equal to Windows. I've played several intense titles which are pushing my laptop's GPU (Nvidia 3070m) to it's limit, most recently the new Indiana Jones game (which is excellent FYI).

extraisland2• 11 months ago

It depends on the game, the distro, the version of the game, the kernel and the windowing system as to how well it performs. I am using Debian and while a lot of games work well, some games are an absolute PITA to setup properly.

It is easier for me to reboot into Windows.

nottorp4• 11 months ago

Hmm I just realized something. The article author seems to be unaware that Apple makes desktops too, and laptops can be connected to external monitors, and thus not every game will be played on something with a notch.

everyone• 11 months ago

Notches are dumb as shit. Eg. when making a cross platform mobile app, you just have to leave a portion of the screen at the top completely empty. Cus various different phones could have a notch or a front facing camera in any position up there. On mobile where screen real estate is tight we just have to give up a really important fraction of the screen because of this madness of non rectalinear screens.

losthobbies• 11 months ago

Part of my decided to get the M3 MacBook Pro because I wouldn't be able to game on it so much - I needed something reliable for a Cybersecurity Masters and I knew if I got a powerful windows laptop I would be tempted to play games .

My is a lovely machine for the most part but overheats a lot when gaming, so much so that it worries me. So I don't bother.

bluedino• 11 months ago

When I was into pixel art games and 8 bit emulation, this caused me to stick with the MacBook Air instead of the Pro, because it had the traditional 1440x900 screen without funky scaling.

Razengan2• 11 months ago

Most of the complains in TFA and the bandwagon here just seem to be lazy/stubborn developers not bothering to understand the platform they're porting to.

There's a kind of entitlement among developers coming from PC/Windows expecting Apple to give them everything on a silver plate, yet they gladly bend over when porting to consoles without a peep.

I mean yeah Apple documentation sucks ass sometimes but sheesh you know the notch is fucking there, you have to account for it. You gotta do some specific shit for PS/XBox/Switch too, can't always just expect a one-click port (yet). Hell, there isn't even any public/3rd-party documentation or articles or YouTube tutorials for consoles but you don't see anyone bitching about that.

V99• 11 months ago

The suggested filtering is just creating a new problem of assuming a 16:10 safe area exists (and external displays or other shapes don't).

Group all resolutions returned that are the same +-5% together and choose the lowest one in the desired bucket.

Blurry rendering of games on Mac

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