Windows supports fractional display scaling with perfect crisp text and graphics. MacOS doesn’t, but it can do integer scaling at least. (Edit: I’ve been corrected. Apparently macOS does do fractional scaling, but in a way that causes blur). Text size and resolution don’t need to be bound.
macOS has scales between 1x and 2x. It doesn’t tell you what the scale factor actually is as a number, just a couple of options between “More space” and “Larger text”.
IIRC the way it’s implemented is by rendering 2x and downscaling, so sometime’s it’s not as pixel perfect as Windows. But the simpler implementation for software developers meant they had like a 10 year head start compared to Windows where software takes a long time to support up new OS features.
APIs existed for fractional scale and assets in early Mac OS X versions (10.4 I think). I remember building out 1.25, 1.5 and 2x assets for an application at the time. These were never to be shipped to consumers for a few reasons.
There were intractable issues with window spanning across displays with different scale factors. Ultimately this was resolved by not allowing window spanning on the platform anymore.
This display spanning issue exists in Windows but I think Microsoft made the right trade off by just allowing that one thing to behave strangely. The other issue is pixel-based UIs that don’t fractional scale without blur, but at this point that doesn’t affect any software I use except little utility programs that I’m not staring at for very long anyway.
Wasn’t there an early exploration of using vector UI elements some time around then? I have a vague recollection of it being found as a partly implemented feature.
i use linux on a retina macbook @ 2880x1800 and fractional scaling works well in swaywm. they warn against it in the docs, but no problems so far (though it's only been a week)
