Blurry rendering of games on Mac (opens in new tab)

Thanks for explaining! I see this is common then. If I'm understanding correctly the docs of NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode[1], this is supposed to be a compatibility mode that apps can opt-out of to behave like I expected, and can be force-disabled from Finder.

So I guess rendering around the notch is the intended experience, but devs don't seem to know or care enough to opt-out, and the bug here is that enumerating display resolutions doesn't take this compatibility mode into account.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

Is bevel size really so important when it's already measured in mm? Personally I like a bit of bevel because I don't want the screen going to the edge of the device. The edge of the device is for holding, not interaction.

> then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded.

The rounded laptop corners is a similar design decision. And also it doesn't look weird to me at all compared to rounded corners for windows, especially when they introduce visible desktop garbage in those now-not-perfectly-covering-rectangles corner areas

First of all, you can not argue anyone out of thinking it looks stupid or ugly. That is a visceral subjective experience and the extra space or whatever does nothing to make up for it.

Now for the bezels, mind that an equidistant circle (or squircle) radius converges to zero. So to avoid having a large inner radius, avoid a large outer radius. The Macbook is not a tablet, you do not hold its corners in your hand.

However, at some point Apple must have decided that the squircle is its entire visual identity and that hard corners on the XY plane are bad. That creates design problems it would not otherwise have.

The fact that developers are led into the trap of not pixel matching to the display however just shows a lack of attention to detail.

> Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear.

Also, it's worth noting that notches are a hardware-specific. I haven't tried any of the MBAs with notches, but the MBPs have good-enough black levels that the notch just kind of vanishes into the black background when using full-screen apps.

The notch reduces the space available in the top menu bar. And since Apple is still incapable of creating a built-in Bartender-like functionality you end up with less space on screen.

It's an actual objective fact of life.

You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely working workarounds in software that don't cover even half of cases.

my menu icons are hiding behind the notch lol

I frequently notice when my menubar items overflow and get truncated behind the notch with no built-in way to actually see them!

You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch.

[1] https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/

You didn’t lose pixels to the notch, you gained pixels beside it!

Option 4 was redesigning a camera unit to be narrow along the whole width of the screen instead of dropping in an oem component that demands the notch.

When you look at the remaining bezel along with the camera unit, the lens is the same size. They really could have built a bezelless mac more or less if they only stretched out the components in that camera unit.

See Lenovo's design here https://p4-ofp.static.pub/ShareResource/na/products/thinkpad...

While I agree in general with your comment, a small nitpick on this:

> There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything.

Well, it can - on mine I have a physical switch that allows me to block the lens, and it saved me a few times. (I just wish I had a similar one for the microphone.)

i'll pick option 1 every time. you can't make me but a computer with a camera in it

> (A number 4 would be to somehow have a front-facing camera that operates without needing to displace screen area. Not clear how this would work without some complicated mechanism to extend the camera out the top of the screen, which would come with its own problems.)

I don't know, Lenovo figured it out, and it's no more ridiculous than Apple's solution. Their notch just goes the other way. It's actually a little bit better, because it gives me a space to put my thumb when I'm opening the laptop to, you know, use it.

Sometimes it seems to me like Apple engineers do not use Apple products, because if they did, there's no way we'd have problems like disappearing icons without a way to get them back (Hell, Windows has had this ability for DECADES, why can't Apple "invent" this technology?). We wouldn't have edge-to-edge glass screens which seem to exist solely to get fingerprints on the screen. We wouldn't have closed lids touching the keyboard, leaving weird patterns on the smudgy glass.

The only other option is that design at Apple is not driven by designers or engineers, but by executives who have no clue. And that's worse.

Expected in the next year or two on the pros, but not yet.

My M1 MacBook Pro turns off the display & backlight that would show the notch as needed, for example right now in full screen Safari you could not tell there is a notch/menu bar area at all. It's actually just as good as it can be already. Free extra space!

Bezel not bevel FYI.

I prefer text to be hinted and antialiased even in low resolutions on a CRT. The first time I saw this on BeOS in the 90s I thought it was a big step up. You get corners snapped to pixels without jagged lines in-between. However, hinting makes text wider or narrower depending on font size and resolution.

Apple chose not to have hinting so as to make the text more dimensionally accurate. That did look blurry ... so Apple then doubled the screen resolution.

Please explain why you disagree?

More natural why? Paper doesn't (usually) have rounded corners and it looks pretty natural to me.

Until you want to do something full screen, then it might be a glaring black rectangle on top of the screen. The way to do it properly is to hide the camera in the thin bezels or somewhere else (inside the LCD, are we there yet?). This is just a lazy solution that designers probably even thought seems iconic.

Yeah, it's annoying. Try:

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar

https://www.macbartender.com

I think there's a native solution (finally) coming in the next MacOS.

You realise you can use the largest rectangular section of the screen as a rectangular screen right? Play a video and you’ll see. It’s the best of both worlds

No, Your TV says it’s 1080 but it’s not, it’s 1074… This is a solved issue now but it wasn’t when HDMI was first introduced. The Xbox 360 suffered from red rings of death. Microsoft hated Linux. And C# was cool.

Basically, if you rendered an avatar image in the top left of the screen, perfectly placed on your monitor, on the TV its head would be cut off. So you change to safe area resolution and it’s perfect again (but on your monitor safe area and screen resolution are the same, except Apple apparently). Make sense?

You can see how if your screen says it’s 4k, but really it’s short 40 pixels, you render at 4k - the screen will shrink it by 40 pixels and introduce nasty pixel artifacts. TV overscan goes the other way. Interesting find by the author about the notch.

Read up on g buffer and deferred rendering. Usually one doesnt do everything at full resolution until the final output and even then it is often better these days to have fancy upscaling.

Many games do let users set the things you mention but it is not always so simple. For example, handling rounded edges and notches is a huge pain.

Between the deprecation and stagnation of OpenGL on the platform, the removal of 32 bit support completely, the refusal to natively support Vulkan in favor of Metal, and the switch to ARM based systems... I can't believe it's still that "high".

It would be smaller than that overall because Steam stats are incomplete, they don't count all the Game Pass users. I haven't opened Steam in the six or so years I've been taking advantage of Microsoft providing a few hundred games for $10/month.

It's worth noting that the percentage of Steam users that are Mac users is not going to be equal to the percentage of gamers who play games on Macs, because not only is Steam not the only distribution channel for games on Mac, it's always been a fairly poor UX there, so bad I don't usually even bother installing it on my Macs anymore. Steam sees me as a Linux user as I have a Steam Deck, but I spend more time playing non-Steam games on my Mac than I do using that.

Actually, I think the last time I installed Steam on a Mac I did so in a CrossOver Games bottle, so even there Steam would have seen that install as a non-Mac user.

EDIT: Also just because I think it's interesting to note this, Steam Deck accounts for most of Linux's headroom there, if you subtract the SteamOS numbers from the rest of Linux it's at 2.07% instead, which is much closer to Mac.

Mac users might prefer to get their games through the default Mac App Store than Steam for distribution which plausibly could unrealistically distort the numbers.

I do my work on a Mac. I game on a game machine. Which right now is a Steam Deck. In the past it's been PS4, 360, Gamecube, PS2, etc.

I think the only game I've put serious time into on my Mac was Hades 1, which I pretty much finished before the console ports happened.

Does Linux include SteamDeck here?

A WWDC session, I might add, with a mildly relevant title and rarely a hyperlink from the relevant documentation, let alone a timestamp.

What's even worse is they used to have great documentation, then for some nonsense reason archived it and replaced it with this wannabe JavaDocs crap with vague function explanations that leave more questions open than they resolve.

They now tell people to watch WWDC videos as if those relatively short videos contained the same amount of information a proper API documentation does.

But if you find anything with the dark-blue "documentation archive" header, then you know it's some good stuff. Though sometimes outdated.

Somebody told me that the quality of a company is directly proportional to the quality of its documentation...

I can attest to that. I used to freelance doing porting about 10 years ago, and the main way of having a stable event loop for a game on macOS is not really anywhere clear in the documentation, at least not anywhere I could find.

Libraries and SDL, GLFW and Sokol handle this for you, and I had to poke inside them to actually figure out how to get the same performance of other games.

In a nutshell, the trick is simple, you call [NSApplication finishLaunching] and do a while-loop yourself instead of calling [NSApplication run].

Most of this stuff uses APIs greater than four years old, so you're probably not getting those videos unless you look at third party rehosts.

No, every app does not need to deal with it, at least in principle. Apple could literally have provided a resolution list which only covers the 16:10 resolutions which aren't covered by the notch, and then games literally wouldn't have known that they were running on a machine with a notch.

The problem here is 100% that Apple, for some reason, provides both 16:10 "safe" resolutions and the actual whole screen resolutions. All those non-16:10 resolutions are a trap, because they cause the compositor to downscale the window to fit below the notch anyway -- they serve literally no point. There is no situation where a user would want a window that's 16:10.39 or whatever and then downscaled to fit within the bounds of the 16:10 safe area, so there is no reason to provide those 16:10.39 resolutions in the list of display modes.

Apple botched the implementation, but the hardware would've been perfectly reasonable and caused no issues or complexities for either users or developers if Apple hadn't botched the software.

OBS works fine. StreamLabs could just be bad software.

Streamlabs is crap on iOS, crap on macOS. As someone else mentioned, OBS works great. I've had no issues with it.

Except for the handful of Mac ports exclusive to the Mac App Store, who with a lick of sense would choose to buy from there? Steam, GoG and Epic are all more feature rich, have more often sales/3rd party resellers and throw in the PC version too.

On iOS there is no choice.

I just replaced a nuc 9 ghost canyon with a Mac mini.

The difference in power consumption is insane. Nuc was 67 watts. The mini is 4-10. I don’t have enough data for a long term average on the mini yet, but it’s ludicrously efficient.

> It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer

Well, Apple doesn't sell 'em with RGB LEDs built-in, so I dunno.

...more seriously though: I don't know how you can say that with a straight-face. On paper, the Apple Silicon M3 and M4 seem comparable to NVIDIA's mid-tier offerings from 3-4 years ago... when rendering to a 1080p-sized display; assuming you'd like to render your games at native Retina or even 5K resolution (given that Apple would really rather you used their display hardware for the best experience, right?) then you'll have to limit yourself to games from the last decade (assuming they've even been ported to macOS in the first place) or convince yourself that this year's AAA titles are fully playable as a slideshow.

...and that's assuming your Mac doesn't start thermal-throttling itself too.

Also, you'll also need a very non-Apple mouse: I'm flabbergasted by how even still in 2025 you cannot independently left-click and right-click on Apple's Magic Mouse[1]; while, ergonomically a multitouch mouse is great for many things, but navigating a wheel-driven UI (e.g. weapon-wheels) is not one of them.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/188431/apples-magic-mouse-an...

> I doubt any of the top brass even uses computers these days looking at the decisions they make wrt Mac OS.

I had a similar thought about the Microsoft manager who just claimed that in 2030 no one will use a mouse and keyboard anymore and people won't want to be "mousing around". If he actually believes that it says a lot about the way he interacts with computers. And how rarely he uses it outside of a quiet office.

Generally, if you lower prices you can sell more volume.

The profit maximising trade-off for Apple might however be where they are right now. Not sure.

People are complaining because the hardware is capable but there are other reasons may make gaming on a mac an annoyance. Not because macbooks are not powerful enough to run games. And to be fair, macbooks can perfectly run games, and indeed a lot of titles perform great, even if most have to use some sort of compatibility layer (roseta 2, vulkan to metal etc). Why should I get a PC just for gaming if my machine can handle that? Especially something like a big form factor gaming PC that takes quite a bit of space in a room.

And this is not a matter of laptop vs desktop because most of these issues (not the notch) will be present for a mac studio.

In fact apple itself has started advertising gaming in macs in WWDCs last years. So it is only fair that people will complain about it.

But in general gaming in macs is perfectly feasible (maybe not the latest most demanding graphics game at max settings, but most of the stuff). You may miss certain graphics features that may not be available for macs, but otherwise performance is not bad. Even playing windows versions of games through whisky or CrossOver is perfectly feasible.

>That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs.

Well that's where you're wrong then. It's perfectly possible to game on a laptop. Over the last decade with the development of the lightning ecosystem and docks it's become a very low friction endeavor as well.

There are a myriad of quality "gaming" laptops out there, but obviously that's not for everybody, and that's one of many reasons why workstation laptops exist (basically the same thing - ability to run at high loads for extended periods of time - without the gamer aesthetic).

There are many casual gamers out there who don't want to shell out for a dedicated gaming device, nor should they win a laptop is a perfectly adequate device to game on. It's not that hard to comprehend.

> If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC.

Push this logic one or two notches further and people should write and build code on desktop only with an e-ink portrait monitor.

Specialization has its place but asking a generic computing device to gracefully handle most applications isn't a big ask IMHO.

They're not running the latest top notch games or anything exotic, it should be fine with no tinkering.

Different people have different trade-offs. Some people like the laptop form factor and want to game on it.

Just like people like the hand held form factor of the Nintendo Switch, but it's still entirely fine for them to complain about the system's low specs. Especially when the Steam Deck and the Rog Ally show that you can do better.

Valid and correct take, but I don’t want to own a Mac and a PC. I’d like to be able to run casual games on my MacBook. I don’t game often or heavily enough to warrant purchasing a rig for it.

Not everyone has the extra money or space to spend on another device just to play games from time to time. I don’t even own a TV, I’m not going to get one, plus a console, plus rearrange my living room and get new furniture to house them, to play games occasionally. Nor will I buy an extra expensive, bulky, and noisy desktop machine and monitor, plus (again) rearrange my furniture.

Additionally, laptops are more than capable of playing demanding games these days.

White-hot take: you are allowed to own an outhouse and a urine only toilet. They aren't like matter and antimatter, and so on.

> If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC.

> White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac.

I do own a console, a pc and two macs. But for what I've paid for the macs Apple should make it easy for me to play games on their hardware if i so choose.

There is some hope: Lies of P is actually very playable on the minimum requirements M2/16G ram. And you get the Mac version on Steam with the Windows version so you're not limited to a single platform.

The Xbox Series S only uses about 80w under full load, and that's built on TSMCs old 7nm process. Apple's bleeding edge 3nm silicon should be able to do even more with a similar power envelope.

100W TDP ought to be enough for anyone.

Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders.

Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially indie ones. Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market.

> What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.

What this "classism" mentality signals is your sense of superiority due to the amount of $ you have in a bank.

Which class does it signal to you?

Back in the day they even implemented near-zero-performance-impact video recording that leveraged AVKit/Quicktime as a Mac-exclusive feature, which was pretty neat. It let me get silky recordings where Windows user guildmates’ videos skipped and stuttered from having to run both WoW and much heavier third party recording software.

Always loved Blizzard games back in the day because I could play with my Mac-owning friends.

Perhaps one or two people on that team have always had personal macs.

Bullshit like this is probably why they sent their developers to farm greener pastures.

If anything it's an example that games can be amazing on macOS, if developers take the time to learn and use the system. WoW on macOS is a far superior experience to WoW on Windows.

> They could do what Windows has done, and build OS code that checks if the running application is a known-legacy game, and lie to the game about various capabilities so that the game runs well and looks good.

Or, even simpler (and AFAIK modern Windows does that too): if the running application doesn't say in its application manifest "I'm a modern application which understands the new things from operating system versions A, B, C and features X, Y, Z", you know it's a legacy application and you can activate the relevant compatibility shims.

Yeah but the difference isn't as stark as one would expect really.

Since "no-one" knows the history, the design go back to prioritizing the basics of comprehension

Even then, you can still have something descriptive like unobstructed_area for more general cases. "Safety" is too generic

But also you don't need to degrade Mac dev experience for games to tackle ipads the games will not be developed on, aliases exist

Of course it's correct, even Apple says so only using a different synonym unobscured https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsscreen/sa...

> The distances from the screen’s edges at which content isn’t obscured.

> because you cannot guarantee

That's a condition you've added without justification. Nothing in the term requires it. The term's core benefit is that it's more clarity. Nothing more (in terms of extra guarantees), but nothing less.

But also, you can guarantee, read the API docs again:

> Content in the safe area is guaranteed to be unobscured

Like,

> “safe area to display in”.

So it's not a "safe area", it's a "potentially a safe area"

> bucking industry standard terminology

yes, bad standards should be bucked, preferably before they become standards, but the next best time is immediately after that or any time later.

It depends on the game, the distro, the version of the game, the kernel and the windowing system as to how well it performs. I am using Debian and while a lot of games work well, some games are an absolute PITA to setup properly.

It is easier for me to reboot into Windows.

A lot of games are ported to Mac / Linux by a third party. The quality of that port is dependant on the company and the budget for porting it. If I was a game developers I would never do a Mac port.

Might be unthinkable to some, but an alternative could also be to have NO camera. People already have a phone with one if they really need it.

The alternative is what literally every other laptop does and just has a rectangular screen. Put the camera outside please and thank you.

iPhones have the same problem. Ever played a fullscreen game and had part of the UI cut off into the notch or island. Yep, it's a problem.

A bezel would be far preferable to a notch.

The problem is, by granting more vertical space in such a way that requires additional application logic to avoid overlaps, you've taken a sacred abstraction (the rectangular screen) and shattered it.

Most applications do not handle this well, and I'm willing to bet that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.

I can see the allure. If you're a default macOS user with the menu bar not set to slide up when not in use, that space nicely fits. Problem still remains for fullscreen apps though.

And it's not even really a hardware problem. Apple could fix this in software. Just make using the unsafe region an opt-in for developers instead of the default. You want to paint in the unsafe region, call NSAllowUnsafeRegionResolution(). Boom done. By default, when the menu bar isn't shown, expose a rectangle to the viewport.

> with the only "downside" being a small unusable area in the center where the camera/mic/other sensors are placed.

The notch is wider than need be. As far as I can tell the main reason is aesthetics. But I agree, it is better than nothing

Notch: Camera, ambient light sensor, and a camera status LED

Dynamic island: camera, infrared camera and flood illuminator, proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor... also half the width and height