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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

Font rendering looks quite crappy in anything but exact 2x resolution doubling mode. I haven't looked into it, but suspect that subpixel rendering is disabled.

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This isn't true, speaking as a happy retina MBP (15") owner. It's almost remarkable just how perfect everything, including fonts, look at the scaled resolutions. It certainly surprised me; the sheer tininess of the pixels really messes with your intuition with this. When you can no longer distinguish between pixels, things like scaling work far better than you have any right to expect.

The only time I have ever seen any issue with scaling was whilst moving a 1 pixel horizontal line across the screen on the "highest resolution" setting, and that's only because I was looking for it.

I have played around with a 15" rMBP in a store and colleague's 13" rMBP at work. Both exhibited the same symptoms in scaling modes other than 2x: font outlines were a lot more blurry than in the 2x mode.

In my experience they are slightly blurrier at the non-doubled resolutions, but still much, much better looking than on a non-retina MBP.

I must've gotten one of the few MBP Retinas that looks great at the non-2X resolutions. The non-2X resolutions might not be as sharp as the 2X resolution, but its still very sharp, and leagues sharper than non-Retina displays.

I've owned the 15" rMBP since June. I use it exclusively in scaled 1920X1200 mode. Fonts are pristinely rendered to my eye. I'm very skeptical that you're able to detect blur in the font outlines at any reasonable distance in properly optimized applications.

What program were you using when you noticed the blur?

Were you looking at native cocoa text controls or at e.g. Chrome?

Text rendered by Safari in a web page.

Actually, for HiDPI applications, font rendering is perfect at every resolution. Only bitmaps get scaled.

Not true at all, in my experience - I've had my retina 15" MBP for a while and haven't had any problems. I run at 1680. The only noticeable problems are blurry raster graphics - which happen at any scaling except 1x (2880.)

The way the high resolutions work is that the screen is rendered at 2x then scaled down to fit the display. This does lose a bit of that subpixel antialiasing, so you're right that it doesn't appear quite as crisp as the native retina scaling. Hopefully this is something they're working on - Quartz could theoretically be modified to detect the scaling factor for the display and render text, shapes, etc to match the native pixels.

When you scale down a subpixel-rendered text that way, you pretty much destroy the subpixel rendering effect.

What I think happens: in modes other than 2x, text is rendered without subpixel rendering. It is scaled down, and possibly a slight sharpening effect is applied in the process. Anyway, the result is not as good as the awesome font rendering we are used to in OS X.

Text on rMBP at "1920x1200": http://i.imgur.com/FAemY.png

I figure that what it does it use the actual rendered pixel grid for subpixel calculations.

Is that in a "Retina app"? If so, my understanding is that text for them is rendered by the system at the right size (so not rendered then rescaled) at any resolution.

Maybe ever so slightly (I would disagree with "quite crappy") - but in any case, worth it for supremely adjustable screen real estate.

Do you have screenshots of this, or a link to screenshots?

This is what it looks like at the 1680x1050 scale factor:

http://cl.ly/KhRt

Note that screenshots are not going to be representative of what you'd see in reality if you're viewing these screenshots on a "non-retina" display. So whilst technically interesting, in that these screenshots can show us how font rendering works when scaled, it's not representative of what you'd actually see if you had a retina display.

This is definitely true. Also, it's worth noting that I had to fake the screenshot - screenshots taken in "more space" mode are taken at the res they're rendered at. I took a screenshot of my screen at that res, switched back to "best for retina", put the screenshot full-screen and took another screenshot of that. It looks pretty much the same to me, but there could be subtleties about the live downscaling that the OS is doing that are different when it's a screenshot vs the actual screen.

Yeah, this seems non-representative, especially if text is rendered natively (as other comments claim). Probably pretty accurate for images though.

Thanks. This is very representative of the font rendering quality I am talking about. (I.e. this is what it looks like in real life too, with your eyes.)

Instead of the normally very crisp rendering, you get this bloated/fuzzy look.

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