Macbook early 2015 question

[Green_Plums]

I'm using a Macbook pro early 2015 model that has a screen resolution of 2560x1600.

I play minecraft sometimes and I've noticed when I fullscreen the game and hit F3 you'll see that the game is running at 1440x900 which is what I've scaled the screen to, what's the point of having a massive 2560x1600 if we can't use it?

 

[Spudlicious]

As I understand it the reason for 2560 x 1600 is so individual pixels cannot be seen.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I'm using a Macbook pro early 2015 model that has a screen resolution of 2560x1600.

I play minecraft sometimes and I've noticed when I fullscreen the game and hit F3 you'll see that the game is running at 1440x900 which is what I've scaled the screen to, what's the point of having a massive 2560x1600 if we can't use it?

You are using it that's why it looks so good, scaling stops everything being only a quarter of the size and impossible to work with while maintaining an ultra sharp image. You can use switchres x and scale your display however you wish but pushing all those pixels individually on a game will destroy your frame rate.

 

[consumeritis]

This is down to Minecraft's graphics code - the developers do have the option of coding it to support rendering in retina mode.

For Minecraft, I'd assume that the Macbook's GPU might even handle it ok. But in general, games put a lot of load on the GPU per-pixel for lighting and post-processing effects, and retina means four times as many pixels to push. That means drawing each frame is going to be approximately four times slower, and your framerate is going to drop. Even dedicated gaming laptops with discrete graphics generally don't support running graphically intensive games at more than 1920x1080.

Maybe there's a mod you can install or something?

 

[Green_Plums]

You are using it that's why it looks so good, scaling stops everything being only a quarter of the size and impossible to work with while maintaining an ultra sharp image. You can use switchres x and scale your display however you wish but pushing all those pixels individually on a game will destroy your frame rate.

Okay, so even though I have the scaled resolution of "1440x900" the screen is still using the full potential of it's screen? "2560x1500" ? The only reason why I feel as though as it's not as when I made the game Minecraft run in fullscreen it reported the screen resolution was "1440x900" rather than 2560x1600, I'm happy with the game running at 1440x900 though I'm just curious to know if OSX is actually using the full 2560x1600 rather than stretching 1440x900 over 2560x1600.

This is down to Minecraft's graphics code - the developers do have the option of coding it to support rendering in retina mode.

For Minecraft, I'd assume that the Macbook's GPU might even handle it ok. But in general, games put a lot of load on the GPU per-pixel for lighting and post-processing effects, and retina means four times as many pixels to push. That means drawing each frame is going to be approximately four times slower, and your framerate is going to drop. Even dedicated gaming laptops with discrete graphics generally don't support running graphically intensive games at more than 1920x1080.

Maybe there's a mod you can install or something?

The Mac actually runs the game very well at 1440x900, at 60FPS very smoothly. Read what I responded to Samuelsan2001 with. I'm just making sure that the Mac is not stretching 1440x900 over 2560x1600, it doesn't look as though as it is when using OSX though when Minecraft reported the that the game was running at 1440x900 I started to question if the screen is actually running at 2560x1600.

Sorry, I've been using Windows for all my life and every PC I've ever had has always used the native resolution of the screen regardless of what application was used.

 

[Hellhammer]

OS X includes built-in scaling for hi-res retina displays. Basically, you get the screen estate of 1440x900 (i.e. that's how big things are), but the physical number of pixels is 2560x1600. With smaller pixels, things are sharper than with a native 1440x900 panel as each "logical" pixel is made out of several physical pixels.

There are tools to run the display at its full resolution, but it's completely unusable as text is way too small to read.