Quick feedback: monitor arrangement, app window position, blurry text

[borekb]

Hi, what an awesome app! Some notes from my testing on an M1 MBP & Dell U3417W (3440 × 1440 WQHD) – I tried both the stable version and the alpha test build 1811:

• When switching hi-res and low-res modes, the monitor arrangement is lost – I have to re-do it manually every time which is quite annoying.

  

• My apps and their windows don't remember their positions after sleep / wake (after I go away from my MacBook and return after a while). I definitely see this in the alpha and I think it was the same in the stable version.

• Things are a bit blurry after I enable hi-res mode. My use case (which may sound a bit silly but there you go) is to be able to take 2x ("retina") screenshots on my standard, low-res external monitor, so I only run either 3440 × 1440 hi-res or 3440 × 1440 low-res settings. When running 3440 × 1440 low-res, things look better than when I enable 3440 × 1440 hi-res – it's not unusably bad but probably some anti-aliasing kicks in and makes things a bit blurry. I didn't find any way to control antialiasing on my version of macOS, which is 12.1 Monterey.

  • It might be similar to this report: HiDPI on 1080P Monitor #48

[waydabber]

Hi @borekb,

Thanks for the feedback!

• The first seems to be a generic macOS issue with mirrored displays located above an other non-mirrored display. The same happens on a simple resolution change (not only on high/low res mode change).
• The second issue might be related to the sleep workaround for the virtual display mirroring sleep bug. You can use display streaming instead on the v1.1.0 beta but it (still) has its own quirks.
• When you use HiDPI mode on a regular resolution, you use 2:1 supersampling (the desktop is rendered exactly in 2x resolution and then scaled back to the normal resolution). The end result is somewhat different than the non-supersampled method especially as M1 does the scaling (which is a bit different than Intel). Some like this effect, others don't. The effect might be exaggerated when you use the font-smoothing hack (something like defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 3).

[borekb]

I tried defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing ... with all integer values between 0 and 3 but could not see any difference – which is strange because I remember it was quite noticeable in the past. Maybe Apple removed these options in Monterey and/or with M1 chips?

Thanks for your replies.

[waydabber]

There is some difference, but not that pronounced (left with 0, right with 3)