Re-enabling 1440p HiDPI on a 4K monitor with 10.10.2

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Re-enabling 1440p HiDPI on a 4K monitor with 10.10.2

Hi everyone,

I have a 2012 rMBP (MacBookPro10,1) that I've been using with an ASUS PB287Q 4K display connected over DisplayPort. As you can imagine, without HiDPI scaling, the monitor isn't really very usable at its full 3840x2160 resolution.

When I was using Yosemite 10.10.1, I was using the monitor at full resolution in 1440p HiDPI mode at 3840x2160 (albeit at 30Hz). This worked great. Desktop real estate was adequate, and the resolution was awesome.

However, right after I upgraded to Yosemite 10.10.2, this mode was no longer available. It could still do its full 3840x2160 resolution, but the only HiDPI scaled resolution was 1080p. 1440p HiPDI mode was no longer available! I have tried getting this mode to work with custom resolutions with SwitchResX, and even creating an display override prefs file in /etc. Nothing seems to work! It's almost like 10.10.2 is actively disabling any HiDPI mode that's not scaled by a factor of 2 or something... At the moment, I'm using "low resolution" 2560x1440, which is... pretty fuzzy and bad looking.

Can anyone help me out here? Any other users have this same problem?

Thanks!

TL;DR: Upgraded to 10.10.2 - 1440p HiDPI on 4K was no longer available. How to re-enable?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Feb 22, 2015 11:35 PM

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Answer 1

OGELTHORPE

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57,305 points

Feb 23, 2015 2:56 AM in response to digggggggggg

According to this Apple support article, your MBP does not support 4k resolution monitors:

support.apple.com/en-us/HT202856

Ciao.

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Answer 2

digggggggggg Author

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Feb 23, 2015 3:18 AM in response to OGELTHORPE

Hey there, thanks for responding!

So, despite that article implying lack of official support, my 4k resolution monitor does work great with my MBP (at 30Hz though). It's just that one 1440p HiDPI mode that went away with the recent Yosemite upgrade.

Should I expect this mode to be available again with a newer 15" MBP that is supported? I don't have one available to test with, so it would be helpful to know about this before making any commitments.

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Answer 3

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,305 points

Feb 23, 2015 5:58 AM in response to digggggggggg

digggggggggg wrote:

Should I expect this mode to be available again with a newer 15" MBP that is supported? I don't have one available to test with, so it would be helpful to know about this before making any commitments.

One would think so but I cannot say with authority. That question is best answered by Apple.

Have you considered of reverting to a prior OSX where you seemed to have better success?

Ciao.

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Answer 4

Mar 5, 2015 3:41 AM in response to digggggggggg

Hi,

I have a Macbook Pro 13 with retina, and a new Dell P2815Q.

I also only get full resolution and 1080p as the options for scaling, and not the ideal 1440p size that would be really rather useful.

Does anyone know how to manually creating scaling options. The difference between 2160 and 1080 is far to big to be useful

Richard

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Answer 5

digggggggggg Author

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Mar 8, 2015 3:31 PM in response to rmbillington

So, I messed around a lot more with switchresX, and discovered you can create any retina resolution by making a custom 'scaled' resolution with double the dimensions in each direction. For example, 1440p turns into 5120x2880.

The caveat here is that you can't set the actual screen resolution. So, for my rMBP, 1440p gets scaled to 1080p and looks like garbage. I'm fairly convinced that this is something that's determined by the driver though. I attached the monitor (Asus p287q) to a Mac Pro with an nvidia graphics card and using the nvidia web drivers (not the default ones that come with mac os x), and the 1440p on 4K HiDPI mode is available and looking great (60hz too!)

I haven't tried this yet, but maybe installing the nvidia web drivers will fix the rMBP resolution as well. Thing is, the Macbook Pro 13 has Intel graphics, right? Not sure if Intel offers alternative mac drivers, but if they do it's probably worth a try.

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