[MindSpunk]

Mac font rendering on non retina displays is pretty awful. Mac 'cheats' somewhat with hDPI screens + aggressive super sampling as MacOS doesn't do fractional scaling and instead rounds up to the nearest integer multiple. At my current display scaling settings my MBP is using a 5120x2880 buffer for my 4k (3840x2160) as it's set to scale to a logical size of 2560x1440.

Under a fair comparison on a 1080p display with no scaling even Windows demolishes MacOS these days. Apple dropped support for subpixel AA years ago which really hurts on standard DPI rendering.

[funcDropShadow]

This idea of scaling graphics up and down instead of rendering at the display native resolution with size measurements in dpi-independent units was so bad. I understood it to be a neat trick, when the first retina displays were relased. But everything afterwards is just awfull.

[nasretdinov]

With fractional scaling you can get objects misaligned otherwise, and I personally found it very annoying e.g. in VSCode with 1.25x zoom, where the objects would move slightly when you interact with them, due to imperfect and inconsistent size calculations.

IMO the way Apple does this is quite brute force and unconventional, but at least the picture doesn't drift with different scale.

[funcDropShadow]

Fractional scaling is not the alternative.