> Your worries about blurry text go away when you use nearest neighbor upscaling (this is configurable in the MacOS zoom settings). Nice crisp text, at the right size.
macOS does not do nearest-neighbour when doing pixel density scaling. It especially does not do nearest-neighbour when the 'looks like' resolution of any display is not a nice divisor of the physical resolution. As the grandparent commenter said, macOS renders to a fixed framebuffer. The size of this framebuffer depends on the pixel density of the physical display; at Apple-blessed densities of ≥ 79 px/cm, this framebuffer is four times the 'looks like' resolution (twice in each dimension); below this, it is the same resolution.
After this rendering macOS applies filtered scaling to fit the framebuffer to the physical resolution. If upscaled, this leads to blurry text and UI; when downscaled, this causes ringing artifacts[1].
I concede that Windows' implementation is simpler, but I will argue that practically it doesn't matter because basically no one I know uses an application window across multiple displays.
My very strong opinion: text/vector UI should never be raster-scaled to fit varying pixel densities.
macOS does not do nearest-neighbour when doing pixel density scaling. It especially does not do nearest-neighbour when the 'looks like' resolution of any display is not a nice divisor of the physical resolution. As the grandparent commenter said, macOS renders to a fixed framebuffer. The size of this framebuffer depends on the pixel density of the physical display; at Apple-blessed densities of ≥ 79 px/cm, this framebuffer is four times the 'looks like' resolution (twice in each dimension); below this, it is the same resolution.
After this rendering macOS applies filtered scaling to fit the framebuffer to the physical resolution. If upscaled, this leads to blurry text and UI; when downscaled, this causes ringing artifacts[1].
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/12j14ud/macos_vs_windo...
I concede that Windows' implementation is simpler, but I will argue that practically it doesn't matter because basically no one I know uses an application window across multiple displays.
My very strong opinion: text/vector UI should never be raster-scaled to fit varying pixel densities.