alt Hacker News> ringing or any specific artifacts at all around text
There are a few Reddit threads that crop up when one searches for 'macOS ringing artifacts scaling'. For instance, these ones:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1252ml8/strange...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ki58zk/fractional_s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/l8oadr/macos_fringin...
All are ringing artifacts, typical of downscaling. I no longer have a Mac (chose one for work to try it out, saw this issue, returned it immediately), but I assure you this is what happens.
> The only complaint people tend to make is ever-so-slight additional blurriness
At no scale factor should there be any blurriness unless a framebuffer resolution is explicitly set. The 'scale factor' should be entirely independent of the physical resolution, which macOS simply does not do.
Apple's understanding and implementation of 'Retina' comes from a singular source: the straightforward doubling in each dimension of the display resolution of the iPhone 4 compared to the iPhone 3GS. It has not changed since, and has applied this algorithm throughout its OS stack.
All of these involve external monitors as far as I can tell, so it seems more likely it's the Display Stream Compression mentioned by the sibling to your comment that is the culprit.
Like I said, absolutely nothing like that happens on my display. I see the ringing in the first link. That doesn't happen to me. Not even a hint of it.
I get you don't like the scaling, but like I said, the very slight blurriness just isn't really noticeable in practice, especially given how Macs antialias text to begin with. Of all my complaints about Macs, this particular one is close to the bottom.