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Comment by bitrot | Hacker News Reader

Per the article, the new MBP actually renders at double the scaled resolution (so 3360x2100 for 1680x1050) and then downscales that to fit 2880x1800. (See the screenshots.) It shouldn't look blurry at all. In fact, it should look considerably better than a MBP with a 1680x1050 display.

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But using a scaled resolution "may affect performance" (understandably, of course, because each refresh now has to draw an enormous desktop and downscale it)

I don't know which screenshots you look at but there sure is blur when not dealing with apps that aware of the retina display, such as chrome (left) vs. safari (right): http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5998/Screen%20Shot%202012-0...

In other words, it depends but it most certainly will have its share of issues, question is for how long.

Yes, but that's not the kind of blurry at issue here.

I would probably look at apps other than Chrome. There's "unaware of the retina display", and there's "we eschewed native APIs to some extent and rolled our own implementations of stuff".

I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome. I'm just saying it might not be wise to generalize from Chrome's appearance to retina-naive 3rd party apps in general.

> I don't know if this is the case, exactly, with Chrome

As part of its security model, Chrome does something akin to rendering everything offscreen in an unprivileged process then passing that to the user-facing process.

Yeah, that sounds like it would do it. On the bright side, maybe they just have to double their offscreen buffer size.

Actually, since it's 2D, they have to quadruple it.

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