Re:MacBook Pro Retina Display Analysis
by chaz on Tuesday June 12, 2012 @08:59AM
(#4100191)
I buy a new MacBook Pro every year, and the dilemma here is similar to Anand's. I bought the high-resolution display on my current 15.4" MBP at 1680x1050. The resolution can be scaled to 1680x1050 or 1920x1200, but I'd like to know how blurry that is as opposed to native resolution. I've flipped my current MBP to 1440x852 to get a feel for the same effective real estate as the Retina Display's native resolution. Will try it out for a few days before pulling the trigger on upgrading.
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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.
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.
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.