As many of you have noticed Apple published the new Macbook Pro with 2880 x 1800 pixels resolution.

How do you think these new very high resolutions will affect DAW or plugin compability...? It would be attractive to buy such advanced computer but I am afraid that it will take like at least 2-3 years before needed software are compatible.

Unless of course the display shows itself as a 1440 x 900 display to legacy software and retina resolution is used trough some new API.

Imagine how small a plugin with fixed pixel size would appear in a retina display unless there is some special solution. It would be one quarter of the area that it would be on a former macbook, most likely to be far to small to be usable at all.

Opinions? Would you buy this computer for DAW?, I suppose it is unlikely that it would work as a retina display trough bootcamp for Win 7....? And probably needs mountain lion to work at all...?

I think I will still end up to 1920x1080 win7 laptop though :I

We're very interested in this.

I hope that the pixel doubling for "unretinized" apps works on per window level, i.e. I hope that we can tell our plugin window to use full resolution even if the daw isn't up to date yet.

We're working on a major enhancement to gui resizing, so the timing for such an option couldn't be better.

(I also wonder what Windows will look like under Bootcamp)

It does.

Displays look thier best at native resolution, this will be great for movies and pics but not so good for DAWs where its mostly lines/boxes and text. try choosing a different resolution other than native on your current laptop/desktop monitor and youll see. At 15.4" - its probably going to make you squint. The same appies to Plugins.

i still can't see a point. very high res on small display, u'd still want to zoom in on stuff. so back to lowering the resolution in display setting ?

Just because it's small on a high resolution display doesn't mean you can't read it. Imagine really tiny text printed on a card or book, you can read it just fine, it's not blurred or anything.

It allows more detail in a smaller amount of space.

It causes eye strain.

Also, many other programs will need to catch up if they do not support DPI settings to scale the UI.

Actually, it reduces it. Colors appear solid, text is sharp, antialiasing isn't visible. Less blur makes better seeing. Yes, apps need to be updated. Any views using native OSX widgets and text should automatically benefit. Custom GUI stuff needs updating and will appear enlarged to emulate the appearance of lower PPI displays.

Another thing is that it does not have a DVD. How will Spectrasonics, Native instruments and sample libraries work that out? I would definitely want one but not 'til these vendors get a solution. Komplete Ultimate is one thing but for owners of Spectrasonics or other NI products on DVD its different.

I run a 2560x1560 smonitor on my DAW at present. Im at a loss to how you consider screen resolution a 'compatibility' issue.



wtf?



and wtf again.



Er, since when was 'it'll look smaller' be a compatibility issue?



Why would it be unlikely? Its a using the IvyBridge graphics and an NVidia mboile graphics chipset. Are you assuming me that there'll be no native windows drivers for products by two of the largest PC component makers out there?

No seriously, wtf a third time.



Im posting on one. And strangely I didnt need a 'compatibility' solution to run the same software as on my old 1280x1024 resolution laptop. Or my 800x600 resolution netbook.
Last edited by whyterabbyt on Wed Jun 13, 2012 1:23 am; edited 1 time in total

For anything up to 32Gb (currently), you'll possibly start seeing stuff shipping on USB stick. Autodesk have just switche to doing that for Maya and AutoCAD.

Larger, and you may need an external DVD/BluRay drive or they might consider portable hard drives like NI have done.

Well, this is how it works - by default, the 'usable' screen resolution is still 1440x900 but everything is rendered using pixel doubling in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. You don't get more desktop space - only image quality improves due to much better anti-aliasing.



DPI scaling that gives you this 'retina' effect is actually a feature of OSX Lion. There is no such thing in Windows 7. I would guess that if you boot into Windows it will simply recognize the screen as 2880x1800 and everything (I mean text, icons, GUI elements) will just look very tiny and in a way will become unusable.

Is that monitor 15"?

1440x900 is the native resolution for "standard" PC monitors with a 19" screen at 16:10.
Now imagine 4 of those 19" screens, 2 on top and 2 below, and everything that is visible on them ... is now compressed down into one of them.

That would make a Windows "close window X" unpractically small, one would miss that all the time, and what is now "giant" text at 12px would suddenly become unreadable 6px text.

Considering that OSX' window close/minimize/etc. buttons are even smaller than the one in Windows, and that the new MacBooks with the retina display don't actually have one 19" screen, but an even way smaller 15" screen, text and symbols and control elements that look fine and are usable on a non-retina display would become unreadable, mini mini small and hardly "hittable" with the mouse, let alone with a Track Pad.

If you open the GUI of a plugin that's designed to look good on a normal non-retina screen, and which probably looked a little compressed on the last MacBook Pros ... imagine what a pile of pixel junk that would look like.
An unreadable, uncontrollable mess, that's what it would make of non-retina-optimized applications.

So yeah, "WTF" alright, in the sense of "are there going to be compatibility issues?".

In that case, how is that related to 'compatibility'?




Well, unless you actually use the Windows 7 ability to rescale the screen elements.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/443-dpi-display-size-se ttings-change.html

Actually they have been doing it for Maya and 3dsMax for more than a year.