MacBook Pro M5 and 3200 x 1800 Resolution on Apple Studio Display

I don’t know much about BetterDisplay, so am not going to advise using it. It’s just that it looked like its authors had figured out some aspects of hardware limitations that were not immediately obvious from Apple’s Support articles and Technical Specifications. The relationship between advertised resolution limits and Retina scaling mode limits is not always clear, especially given that some chips seem to have more relaxed rules than others.

The OP could try having Displays Settings show all resolutions, as a list, to see if a Retina scaling mode between 2880 x 1620 and the unavailable 3200 x 1800 shows up. Maybe a 3008 x 1692 mode (which would be the “default” for a 6K Pro Display XDR) will turn up.

<< It may just be a GPU limitation or something. >>

That is a limitation induced by the native resolution of the display. Your MacBook Pro Display is obviously not the same native resolution as the Apple Studio Display.

Nor is it likely to be the same pixels-per-inch on the screen, so seeking a particular number that seems familiar may not make sense for a different display.

You want scale factors that are straightforward to accomplish and trouble free, like 2x or 1.5x. The provided choices are based on those pre-tested pleasing results. Arbitrary choice of Scaling factors could introduce wild Moiré interference patterns into your otherwise crisp text.

I don't know of ANY way to get a scaled resolutions other than the ones Apple included.

Thanks for contributing, that is very informative. This issue sure is complicated.

For the Punchline, What do you recommend the author do for their situation?

• Try to use better display to get closer to where they want to get?

• or is it hopelessly constrained by the M5 (plain) ability to deal with display buffers as wide as would be required for their preferred "looks like" resolution?

You paid for an Apple Studio Display, capable of 5120 by 2880 resolution.

Please explain why you would want to trash about 3/8 of the capability you paid dearly for.

samdale67 wrote:

With my previous MacBook Pro M4 Ultra

Apple has never used Ultra chips in any Mac notebook.

if what you want is readability, you need to get off the itemized resolutions list and use this screen, introduced for all HiDPI display after the Retina display was released, or its current implementation:

When you select one of those, the display runs at its full natural resolution, and TEXT (only) is drawn much bigger in an off-screen buffer, then Scaled down onto the display buffer.

Text characters end up with remarkably crisp edges and smooth diagonals without stair-stepping.

Even though you know you want text at a different resolution, Counter-intuitively, DO NOT choose a resolution from a list.

Choose SCALED

Then pick a resolution from the choices provided that gives you the best readablity.

You can select overall Display Resolutions (NB not Scaled resolutions) far less than the native 5120 by 2180.

But that is, as I said in my first reply, that will be throwing away Resolution you paid dearly for.

The pixels-per-inch on the displays you mentioned are also not identical. Recent Apple builtins tend to be about 250-ish pixels per inch on screen, and the Apple Studio Display is about 218 pixels per inch.

Choosing exactly 3200 by 1800 makes no sense for a display with a different number of pixels per inch and a different overall screen resolution.

I suggest you pick the most pleasing from the Scaled Resolutions provided, live with that for a while and see if you could get used to it.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

<< It may just be a GPU limitation or something. >>

That is a limitation induced by the native resolution of the display. Your MacBook Pro Display is obviously not the same native resolution as the Apple Studio Display.

The OP's screen shot indicates that the OP is trying to set the resolution for an external Apple Studio Display – and that the "More Space" choice corresponds to Retina "like 2880 x 1620" mode.

Retina "like 3200 x 1800" mode would imply that the internal canvas had 6400 x 3600 pixels, which is a little bit more than the 6016 x 3384 pixel LCD panel resolution of a 32" Apple 6K Pro Display XDR. There have been one or two other threads where people haven't been able to get preferred Retina scaling modes on M5 MBPs, and in those cases, I believe we would also have been talking about internal canvases with resolutions of >6K.

So this could be a limitation of the GPU in the plain M5 chip, after all.

Then there is this, for whatever it is worth:

waydabber / BetterDisplay Wiki – Fully scalable HiDPI desktop

"The maximum horizontal pixel count is constrained on the entry-level M1/M2 configurations to 6K (meaning 6144px or 3072px HiDPI). On M1/M2 Pro/Max/Ultra the max horizontal pixel count is 8K (meaning 7680px, which translates to max 3840px horizontal HiDPI resolution). These limits might pose an issue to ultra-wide display users trying to go beyond a certain horizontal resolution."

This is consistent with the behavior of a M1 Max Mac Studio, which offers Retina scaling modes

• "like 3360x1890" (in icon and list views)
• "like 3200x1800" (in list view)

on a 27" UHD 4K (3840x2160 pixel) monitor. Both of those modes produce text that is too small and hard to read for my liking, so I don't use them, but the hardware doesn't have any problem with them.