Your Mac’s notch might be making your games blurry

If you play games on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, a bug first reported in 2023 could be making them appear blurry.

The problem, Developer Colin Cornaby says, is the way macOS reports a MacBook’s built-in display resolution to games. Macs provide their display resolution to games each time they are launched to prevent inappropriate ones from being used.

Unfortunately, the resolution provided to games doesn’t always take into account the pixels that have been replaced by the notch. The result? The game effectively draws pixels that would never normally be shown.

That would be bad enough, but the developer warns that the issue is compounded when macOS actually displays the game full-screen. Normally, MacBooks move the image down to keep it out of the way of the notch, creating a resolution mismatch.

“The problem with Apple laptops is they have a notch at the top of the display,” the developer explains in a blog post. “The full screen area your game runs in is not the same resolution as the screen. Most games do not account for this problem.”

Gamers playing on a notch-endowed display see an image that’s larger, in terms of pixels, than the physical area available to it. This results in a blurry image.

Bugs won’t help Apple’s aim of bringing gamers to the Mac – Image Credit: Apple

Obviously, the compression only happens vertically, and it’s unclear just how big an issue it is in real-world use. In his example, the developer uses his MacBook Pro, which has a resolution of 3456 x 2234 pixels. That resolution includes the notch.

However, games only have access to the area below that notch — in this case, a 3456 x 2160-pixel area. 74 pixels aren’t accounted for, meaning the image is squashed vertically.

Gamers who play on an external monitor are not affected — only those who use a MacBook’s built-in display.

Windowed mode players are also unaffected. The issue only crops up when games are played in full-screen mode.

OK, but why?

The reasons for this are complicated, but it seems that macOS gives games not one resolution on launch, but two.

Where games require access to the available resolution, macOS also provides the full display resolution alongside it — including the area behind the notch. Which of those the game uses can be hit-and-miss, but there is no current way for developers to specify which should be chosen or discarded.

One potential workaround for gamers is to make sure that they select an in-game resolution with a 16:10 ratio. Unfortunately, they aren’t always available depending on how the game handles the display information provided by macOS.

Ultimately, whether or not the loss of 74 pixels is enough to bug most people isn’t clear, especially when the vertical resolution is more than 2,100 pixels. But it’s a bug that should be fixed, regardless.

Cornaby says that he reported this bug to Apple in September 2023, but it has yet to be addressed.

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