[chrisseaton]

I'm not really sure what you think 'scaling' means or what you think this Stack Exchange answer means, but macOS (not 'MacOS') does allow scaling the UI of both integral and external monitors, and independently.

It renders a high-resolution image to a buffer, and then scales that when rendering to the actual screen buffer. The buffer image is at least as large as the actual screen buffer.

You can see for yourself that it isn't changing the hardware resolution of external monitors when scaling by taking a look at the actual resolution on your monitors OSD if it has done. It'll always be the native resolution.

[lostmsu]

It does not do 1.5 or 1.33 or 1.25 scaling, or does it blurred. Windows can handle any ratio.

[chrisseaton]

Again I don't really know what you think you mean by 'blurred'? How do you think this is working?

If I tried all the possible scalings for my external monitor, the grey line around each window, to give a specific example of, is always a crisp physical one-pixel wide.

macOS creates a buffer to render to that is the same size as the physical output you're choosing to use, and is able to render with pixel precision in that buffer.

[lostmsu]

Would be easier if you said what scalings have you tried and what is your external monitor native resolution.

[chrisseaton]

4k external monitor - here's HN at all the scalings https://imgur.com/a/QTrI6uJ. For example, look at the white box around the Y, that's always rendered precisely on hard physical pixel boundaries. It's one pixel for some scalings, then moves to two pixels for larger scalings. It's never a blur from a larger or smaller image that is then interpolated. It renders at the native resolution, knowing physical pixel boundaries, by the scaling of the render commands (the x and y to render at, before the render command runs) not an intermediate rendered image. (Remember to download the images so you aren't using browser interpolation to scale them.)

[lostmsu]

This looks pretty good. Though scaling in browsers has been mostly independent of corresponding OS features for quite a while. E.g. the issues mentioned above with Linux and fractional scaling do not affect browsers as much. The problem is usually with native UI elements, such as the settings app itself.

However, it is unclear to me what are the scaling ratios relative to the native resolution in your examples. In this article for Sierra you seem to be only able to pick integer factors: https://www.eizoglobal.com/support/compatibility/dpi_scaling...

[chrisseaton]

> In this article for Sierra you seem to be only able to pick integer factors

Maybe? But that's ancient history.

I don't know what the ratios are - the UI doesn't expose them.

[dragonwriter]

> It does not do 1.5 or 1.33 or 1.25 scaling, or does it blurred. Windows can handle any ratio.

Non-integer scaling (of a pixel source, vectors are different but not relevant here) either requires blending or crisp unequal-sizing artifacts.

[lostmsu]

In Mac OS, because that's how its scaling is designed. Windows does not have this problem, because it tells programs to render themselves at 1.33 or whatever and provides facilities to do it without pain in the ass. As the result scaling in Windows is painless with any displays at any resolutions. In fact, my main setup has two 1.25x DPI displays and an old 1x DPI display with zero blending or sizing artifacts excluding brief moments when you move a window from 1.25x display to 1x one until it lands.