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Comment by elwebmaster | Hacker News Reader

Second screenshot looks blurrier to me than the first. Both are bad. It’s not a Mac.

Apple have always preferred preserving letter forms over hinting, so Macs are therefore also "blurry" on lower DPI displays. The reason they aren't these days is because the DPI is higher.

Usually when people complain about this, the comparison is to Windows, which prefers strong hinting, i.e. snapping the font shapes to within (sub)pixel boundaries.

There also used to be patent encumbrance issues around subpixel rendering, making Linux font rendering on TFTs overall worse by default, but as of 2019 those have expired. Some distributions had already enabled those features anyway.

With any reasonable resolution screen (1080p or more), you can have both good preservation of letter forms and a non-blurry image, simply by applying a sharpening filter after antialiasing. Some image downsampling methods, such as Lanczos filtering, effectively do this for you. The tradeoff is one can detect some very fine 'ringing' artifacts around the sharpened transitions, but these don't impact readability in any way.

Mac font rendering on non retina displays is pretty awful. Mac 'cheats' somewhat with hDPI screens + aggressive super sampling as MacOS doesn't do fractional scaling and instead rounds up to the nearest integer multiple. At my current display scaling settings my MBP is using a 5120x2880 buffer for my 4k (3840x2160) as it's set to scale to a logical size of 2560x1440.

Under a fair comparison on a 1080p display with no scaling even Windows demolishes MacOS these days. Apple dropped support for subpixel AA years ago which really hurts on standard DPI rendering.

This idea of scaling graphics up and down instead of rendering at the display native resolution with size measurements in dpi-independent units was so bad. I understood it to be a neat trick, when the first retina displays were relased. But everything afterwards is just awfull.

With fractional scaling you can get objects misaligned otherwise, and I personally found it very annoying e.g. in VSCode with 1.25x zoom, where the objects would move slightly when you interact with them, due to imperfect and inconsistent size calculations.

IMO the way Apple does this is quite brute force and unconventional, but at least the picture doesn't drift with different scale.

Fractional scaling is not the alternative.

Mac font rendering is the worst out there.

For example: https://i.redd.it/f61p6sa34cta1.png

Or: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/screen-shot-2022-10...

When i look at the first picture the Mac is blurrier but at same time the Windows doesnt keep the balance of the font. Look at all the horizontal vs verzical strokes in ZLF they are for sure drawn to be same optically thickness but on windows they are very wrong.

I dont think windows is such clear winner here. Seems like different philosophies.

Just hold the phone at some distance, you will see how bad MacOS'es one is in reality.

You don’t see the obvious artifacts?

Forget the font rendering, it looks like a poorly tuned scaling filter with excessive ringing is being applied in the macOS case. That halo around the letters is the result of a sharpening or bicubic+ resampling filter that's turned up too high.

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