macOS 4K Scaling Explained: The TRUTH About Quality And Performance!

In this video, I want to go over a topic that many people have asked me about — scaling on 4K monitors on Mac. While there does seem to be some information out there suggesting this may be a significant hit to performance, some data suggests otherwise. I spent that last week researching and testing things out, and I have my own thoughts on the matter. Watch for more.

MY 4K MONITOR OF CHOICE:

MY DESK SETUP GEAR:

0:00 Introduction
0:41 What Is Display Scaling?
1:23 How Does Display Scaling Work?
3:11 The Problem With 4K Displays
4:27 4K Display Quality
6:14 4K Scaled Performance
10:00 What Might Be Happening
11:54 Wrapping Up

MUSIC I USE IN MY VIDEOS IS ALL FROM EPIDEMIC SOUND
Get a free month with the link below:

LINKS TO PRODUCTS MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS
By using the affiliate links, I earn a small fee from any purchase you make. It won't cost you anything to use them. By clicking them it helps support me, and create more content for you. Thank you for the support!

[mafi]

I was literally looking for a new monitor for my Macbook right now, and the 4k scaling issue was still a big question mark. And then your video came online, what a fortunate coincidence!

[csimet]

Nice overview. Being a photographer, I picked my iMac 5K to give me as much room to work at 1::1 density and added a 4K LG to my MacBook for the same reasons. I needed the ability to zoom to 100% 1::1 resolution to edit and apply sharpening correctly. Having said that, I wish Apple would allow independent text scaling (2x, 4x, etc.) along with the display scaling... it can be a pain on those monitors to see menus, fly-outs and panels since they can be very small on those high density displays. It usually means working closer to the monitors than most would typically do so.

[chrisleedesignstudio]

Thanks Kyle! I appreciate your well-researched content and the high production value of this video. I’m a graphic designer working on a mac mini m1 and am so happy I found your channel. I’m thrilled about buying the 27” 4k monitor and scaling to enlarge the interface so I can actually see the menu. I also appreciate the many helpful viewer comments. Generating great engagement like this portends much success for your channel! Way to go!

[maekloev]

Very thorough explanation on how scaling works on macOS. Certainly the best I’ve encountered so far. Very well presented - thanks a bunch! 👏

[smajdovamanka]

A thing to note - the text rendering quality on non-retina displays degraded when Apple removed sub-pixel antialiasing. It was hidden from the settings in Mojave and removed entirely in Big Sur. The scaling wasn't an issue beforehand, you could use a 1366x768 display and it would have nice, sharp text. It was my favourite MacOS feature and they didn't bother to support it because with Retina displays it's not needed. But if you have a 3rd party monitor with less DPI than ~220, it doesn't look as good anymore.

This is of course a separate issue than the performance. I never noticed a difference running scaled resolutions. But the font rendering thing bothers me a lot as a webdev. Such a dickmove from Apple.

Kyle says the difference is not noticeable, which may be true if you're on 4k 27", but on 32" it's not. The text looks like garbage, it's blurry, the whole thing is embarrassing considering Jobs was about nice typography.

More info:

[IsaacFromHK]

From my experience, the scaled performance thing doesn't really affect M1 chipset much, but if you use an intel mac, and try to watch some video at scaled resolution, you will see the GPU usage jumps up pretty high and the fan starts to kick in.

that is true when I compared this on my 2017 macbook pro 15 inch vs the Mac mini m1

[Ben]

I’ve been researching this topic for the last couple of weeks and found so many different answers. Thank you so much for clearing this messy topic up once and for all, excellent video! 🙏👏👌

[gregfromthevaley]

I just don’t understand why Apple won’t let us change size of system font. We could use monitors native resolutions and adjust interface

[zrdfx]

Great video on a topic I am very interested in since I just bought 2 27" 4k panels for my m1 pro. I have to say I have used the scaling option and everything is working just fine. No slow downs or anything.

[finalcutstudio]

Finally someone made a concise, well researched video to address such a serious Apple Mac screen display issue. There are a few other videos related to this issue and they certainly contain a lot of scare-mongering misinformation. This video hits the nail on the head. As a video editor, plus grading footage means I am using a 5K Mac Display plus a 4K Display as dual monitors with my Mac Studio. Thank you. 🙂

[jayel]

As someone who has been using dual 4K monitors since 2015 and recently went triple monitor setup I can confirm that the scaling is a huge problem on intel macs and less so on my M1 mini and even less in my M1 Max Studio Max… for now anyways.

Webex, google meet and zoom kill the machine and force me to disconnect a display and switch to 1080p in order to stay on a call. Even more so if I’m trying to screen share.

When I work on my 34” 1440p ultrawide I have zero issues with performance. Same scenarios run smooth. That’s in a 2019 15” MBP with 32gb of ram and two GPUs.

Go 5k or 1440p. It will future proof your setup. Trust what apple is doing. They’ve optimized their machines well as well as scaling.

[mrsin]

I really like your real-world approach to your testing, although you‘ve missed a pretty important point in regards to 3D rendering performance: as long as you‘re rendering something like cinebench where you‘re outputting a specific resolution, of course there‘s no change in performance because the workload is literally the same. When you‘re rendering a 1080p image, you‘re always rendering a 1080p image no matter the scaling. Now if you take a look at realtime rendering performance, like the blender viewport, you will definitely see a performance impact because the viewport is rendering at a resolution based on your internal resolution. So 1x scaling renders at the displays native 4k resolution while something like 1.5x renders at an internal 5k resolution which will demand a lot more from the GPU. With simple scenes not a big deal. But when your scene becomes more complex, that impact will become increasingly noticeable.

[jdelgadocr]

After researching on this issue and watching other videos on this specific topic I came to the conclusion MacOS takes the info from the monitor to determine if it is "Retina capable" based on the pixel density and the target number is 220 ppi. People with 27"4K have to juggle around and play with the scaling to get something that works for them. As I was using a 23" 1080p and my objective was better image quality for my sight (instead of screen real state) I opted for a budget 24" 4K from LG which, apart of manually adjusting the color calibration, it enabled the Retina scaling by default and I didn't need any hacks. I'm using an MBA M1 8Gb with Big Sur.

[caedenisviral]

extremely underrated youtuber, going off the quality and video information alone, I would’ve assumed you had over a million subscribers. Keep up the good work man 👍

[Vincent_Roy]

Thanks for the video. I have been using a Viewsonic VP-2768 4K for a year now on my M1 Mac Mini connected in DP on a thunderbolt hub, and noticed no issues.

[josefrogoschewsky]

Excellent video - really enjoy your explanation of scaling vs performance and your overall video style, great job.

[pricejs]

I wish I would have seen this video earlier. I wasted way too much time and mental energy stressing about this issue. Thank you for making this plain and clear!

[tutubeos]

In the end I bought the LG 40” ultrawide for my Mac Studio. Yes, in native resolution, text is too small. I’m using it scaled, no issues, its awesome! Thank you! 🙏

[Aspireonthego]

Thanks for the awesome and in-depth explanation! I have a 27" 4K monitor hooked up to my top spec macbook pro 16" 2019 and have not noticed any performance hit, scaled at 1440p. Under most tasks, I don't even hear the fans spin up.

[sudZAYNsu]

For those who are still wondering which monitor to buy for Mac then go for 5k monitors if you have budget or go for 4k monitors, your last option should be 2k monitors. On 4k monitor you can just scale down to 1080p for Retina like display quality or scale down to 1440p which looks a bit better than the native 1440p display. I’ve tested both 4k and 2k monitors on mac. I preferred 4k monitor over 2k. Currently I own Asus Proart Pa279CV 4K Monitor. I bought it for editing purpose, colors look very accurate out of the box as it has Delta E < 2. It’s mentioned as 10bit monitor but it’s actually 8bit + FRC. Anyway I am very happy with my decision.