MacBook Air M2 UI Scaling / Palette Issue [Resolve 18.1.1]

Howdy BMD Forum Folks,

I've noticed a persistent UI scaling issue when using Resolve on the 2022 MacBook Air M2 (v. 18.1.1 currently, but this has been a consistent issue with all releases of v18 at the least). The symptom of the problem lies in how the Palette Area of the Color page is incorrectly adjusted to combine the Left, Center and Right Palettes into just a Left and Right Palette, while the root of the problem (assumedly) lies in that Resolve does not recognize the M2's Liquid Retina display (2560 × 1664) as an HD display, regardless of the HiDPI scaled display setting used in System Settings. I'm assuming this based on Blackmagic's own literature; pgs. 2743 & 2744 of the Resolve 18.1 manual state:

[pg. 2743] At 1920x1080 resolution or higher, a second set of palettes is organized at the bottom center of the Color page. [...]
[pg.2744] NOTE At lower resolutions, the Left and Center palettes are merged to fit the DaVinci Resolve interface into a smaller area.

As you can see in the attached stills, this ends up being a fairly significant misuse of screen real estate on what is assuredly an increasingly common machine for this application. The software scopes (locked to 1-up display without expanding) are stretched to a frankly ludicrous and in-adjustable degree.

My initial theory supposes that Resolve's UI is not currently HiDPI-aware, and instead sees the M2 Air's screen as having it's "effective" scaled resolution instead of it's "actual" resolution. The M2 Air's System Settings exclusively allow for HiDPI settings for the built-in display, and while the hover-over info for the M2's "Default" display option reads "1470 x 956, and the "More Space" hover-over reads "1710 x 1112," it is my understanding that the nominal resolution of the display is still in fact 2560 × 1664. In previous iterations, this hover-over info has read "looks like [resolution]," which is both more and less helpful than showing what Apple's scaling filter is effectively showing, but I digress. I've included stills of Resolve on the M2 using the "More Space" display setting, and have examples of the "Default" setting as well if desired.

One thing to note is that when a second display is connected to the M2 Air and it's set to mirror displays, and that second display is at least 1920x1080, Resolve then does show all 3 palettes in the Color Page. This isn't surprising, but it is illustrative of the larger problem.

Here's the make-up of this machine:

MacBook Air ('22) | Apple M2 | 24 GB | Ventura 13.0.1

I have updated both MacOS and Resolve to their currently most up-to-date versions (13.0.1 and 18.1.1, respectively). I have attempted all of the display settings in System Settings, and each time, I clicked "Reset UI Layout" in Resolve's "Workspace" menu. I have not yet attempted to turn off HiDPI with an app such as SwitchResX, primarily because this seems by my testing thus far to be a Resolve specific issue, and I'm disinclined to turn off a setting that functions properly to accommodate software that is not functioning properly.

One big caveat to all of this: It is entirely possible that I am quite wrong, and I have missed something exceedingly, embarrassingly obvious. Nothing would make me happier.

Looking forward to hearing the community's and dev team's thoughts! Thanks in advance.

[Shrinivas Ramani]

Hi

When you connected the display, did you move the Resolve window over from a previous smaller display?

If you select Reset UI layout from the workspace menu - or in the right palette, if you switch to keyframes and toggled the expand button twice, do you get back 3 palette areas?

Regards
Shrinivas

Can't really help with the situation sorry, but have a couple of questions about your setup.

Is 'More Space' the highest you can go? Is there an option for Native resolution, or something at least closer?

Main thing though, is how does this machine perform generally? I thought 24gig of ram was a very odd number at first, but think it would actually work pretty well splitting between GPU and CPU. Do you have the 8 core or 10 core GPU? What sort of workload would you say it is capable of? How does it compare to your windows machine? Any info would be much appreciated!

When you connected the display, did you move the Resolve window over from a previous smaller display?

I did not. The second display was always a 1080p projector (college classroom setting), set to mirror my MacBook display. Whenever that projector gets plugged in, it automatically switches the MacBook display to produce a 16:9 container.

If you select Reset UI layout from the workspace menu - or in the right palette, if you switch to keyframes and toggled the expand button twice, do you get back 3 palette areas?

No, selecting Reset UI produces no discernible result outside of bringing my other UI settings (node sizing, folder sorting, etc) back to the default settings. The expand button in Keyframes is grayed-out.

Is 'More Space' the highest you can go? Is there an option for Native resolution, or something at least closer?

"More Space" is indeed the highest setting, at least on this version of MacOS on this MacBook Air ('22 M2). There's no Native resolution option as far as I can tell.

Main thing though, is how does this machine perform generally? I thought 24gig of ram was a very odd number at first, but think it would actually work pretty well splitting between GPU and CPU. Do you have the 8 core or 10 core GPU? What sort of workload would you say it is capable of? How does it compare to your windows machine? Any info would be much appreciated!

The computer performs astonishingly well in terms of raw performance. I have no qualms in terms of playback frame rate, render speeds, etc. I just downloaded an 8K R3D from Red's sample footage collection, and got 15 FPS playback in a 1080p project with a 4 frames better Temporal NR node on. That's perfectly sufficient for my needs on this machine. Does that stack up against my 3090? No, but it doesn't need to. Bottom line, this laptop screams. The scaling issues with Resolve are my ONLY issues with it thus far.

My machine has the 10-core GPU.

Is 'More Space' the highest you can go? Is there an option for Native resolution, or something at least closer?

Main thing though, is how does this machine perform generally? I thought 24gig of ram was a very odd number at first, but think it would actually work pretty well splitting between GPU and CPU. Do you have the 8 core or 10 core GPU? What sort of workload would you say it is capable of? How does it compare to your windows machine? Any info would be much appreciated!

You can go to a level of resolution where you it gets really difficult to read anything, even with eagle eyes.

Regarding performance, I'm also very impressed. I used to have a 2017 iMac with an eGPU before, and this laptop is about twice as fast and very quiet. The iMac was sounding like a vacuum cleaner when rendering, while the M1 is rather like a soft summer breeze. I think I can even contribute a little bit to reduce global warming with its low amount of energy consumption.

Regarding the scaling issue: if my MBP M1 is set to 'Standard', DR will reduce the palettes. If I set it to 'More Space', DR will not change even after a restart of the program. But if I click on 'Reset GUI' then, it'll show all the palettes.

Thanks for your response. That's great to know just how capable it is! Was pleasantly surprised with how capable the M1 Mini was as a last resort transcode machine, so good to know that the M2 is upping things!

Mine is M1 Pro.
Transcoding with Apple silicon is so fast because of the hardware de- and encoders.

We can all agree, the Silicon line of MacBooks are pretty rad!

Now, back to this scaling issue - BMD devs, any further thoughts / questions / suggestions?

So, what I described didn't work for you?

So, what I described didn't work for you?

It did not. I believe this may be due to us being on different machines. Mine is a MacBook Air M2, not a MacBook Pro M1.

I'd like to chime in. Just purchased a new MBP 16 with the M1 MAX and am having the same issue. I think every mac that has a notch in the screen has this issue. If I'm not mistaken, these are new resolutions for Macbook displays.

Resetting UI is useless, and the option to expand out the palettes is greyed out.

The only fix is to change the entire OS scaling to the smallest possible, but then everything is tiny. I really hope Blackmagic comes out with a fix for this.

Go to: System settings -> Displays -> Advanced... -> Show resolutions as list –> Show all resolutions. Then click the highest resolution, restart Davinci and you should be all set. Then you can lower the resolution while Davinci is still open and it comes better readable and layout stays the same.