BetterDisplay VS Opencore-Legacy-Patcher

> the 4K monitors the author recommends are not good for macOS due to them not supporting native retina scaling above 1080p

Is this true even with the help of 3rd party apps?

My 3840x1600 ultrawide has that problem using the native screen resolution tools but I can get it to full-res HiDPI using BetterDisplay [0].

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/

2. "BetterDisplay" for better scaling quality on bigger screens, especially if you have a 4k ultrawide. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It isn't a device, it's a software tool. It doesn't make the monitor magically 2x the resolution; it can trick macos to render onto a 5k buffer and then downscale the output to the physical display so it looks not-broken.

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

I'm not saying that it'll make 4k look good. I'm saying macOS is unusable on native resolutions - everything is either too small or too blurry, so a 4k display won't do me any good. 25x14 is the sweet spot for me, but I guess Apple decided I'm holding it wrong.

Download BetterDisplay (free to try, $18 for Pro, and well worth it IMO): https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

This article is very good to explain this ppi thing https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ also an extra app can make some monitors display sharper (hidpi) https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It can be found here: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

So I installed the Better Display 2 app [link] , enabled HiDPI 1280x720, and suddenly everything looked both extremely sharp and in a good size. Judging by the size of the screenshot, it mimics Retina 2560 × 1440 and scales it down 2x to 1280x720, making it HiDPI. I can totally recommend you to do as I did.

At a guess I would say probably using OCLP - https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher - lots of life left in old Mac’s using that tool !

I had this issue, too. But luckily, I've got a solution. First, you'll need to check your MacOS Sonoma version. If you're using 14.1 beta, this method will NOT work. In such cases, I recommend installing the official 14.0. Thankfully, this commit (https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/commit/1aee2e5dfa12d10e218a51e4151ac2e96705ae9e) solved the problem! However, the latest OCLP 1.0.1 still doesn't have it. To use it, you can build OCLP from code or use the OCLP Nightly link found here. After you find the nightly link and download OCLP, build it onto your MBP, and after rebooting, install the patches. If you look carefully, you'll see that 'experimental T1 Patches' will be available in the list of post-installation patches.

From what I've assessed reading other posts, Monterey (Ventura has USB & stability issues) with OCLP 0.6.7 is the most stable install for this device (have not yet seen any reports using OCLP 1.0+, although happy to see some new non-Metal fixes going in). This is a bit of a bummer, as Monterey will not likely receive updates past end of 2024 (next year).

I'm not taking a position on OCLP being trustworthy or not, but at least the project appears to be 100% open source [0], which is more than we can say about Apple.

[0] https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

Have you explored https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher?

I have used it before and, in my experience and everyone else I know who has used it, the vast majority of time the newer versions run absolutely fine with no issues. Occasionally some newer features don't work, but I'd but confident that 2015/2017 iMacs would be able to run the latest version no problem.

Link to pull request to track OLCP Sonoma support state, you can also read more info there: https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/pull/1077