Oh it’s not just Apple…

This was an issue I also discovered on Xbox 360 in 2008. TV’s have overscan and depending on that setting, your resolutions will be off.

However, at the time, we couldn’t create render targets that matched the overscan safe area. XNA added a Screen SafeArea rect to help guide people but it was still an issue that you had to consciously develop for.

Now, we can create any back buffer size we want. It’s best to create one 1:1 or use DLSS with a target of 1:1 to the safe area for best results. I’m glad the author went and reported it but ultimately it’s up to developers to know Screen Resolution != Render Resolution.

Anyone using wgpu/vulkan/AppKit/SDL/glfw/etc need to know this.

Which says more about the volume of the market of gaming on Mac. It's small and unfortunate.

Also consider setting NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode and just leave self letterboxing control to a toggle in the settings (with whatever default you prefer).

interesting -- I ran into this recently playing baldur gate 3 and was curious the technical details why. my fix was that I had an external monitor and I just reset the resolution to the external monitor. (by default, though, the monitor was showing up blurry though; with the wrong aspect ratio.)

Yes!

I remember first implementing this in Planimeter Game Engine 2D, we got a massive resolution list from SDL (through LÖVE, which is what we're built on).

If I remember correctly, we filtered the list ourselves by allowing users to explicitly select supported display ratios first, then showing the narrowed list from there. Not great. Technically there's a 683:384 ratio in there.[1]

But it did enough of the job that users who knew what resolution they wanted to pick in the first place didn't have to scroll a gargantuan list!

[1]: https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d/blob/v9.0.1/eng...