Dota 2 on macOS does not support Retina resolutions

[troughton]

When playing the game on macOS in a Retina display configuration, the highest displayed resolution in the Settings window is the point resolution (rather than pixel resolution) of the screen.

This occurs for both OpenGL and MoltenVK. A possible fix might be to pass SDL_WINDOW_ALLOW_HIGHDPI in the flags for creating the SDLWindow.

If the desktop resolution is manually set to non-retina mode (e.g. 5120x2880 rather than 2560x1440 HiDPI), Dota 2 correctly displays the full range of resolutions.

[jeanlain]

You can pick 5120*2880 by choosing "exclusive fullscreen".

[troughton]

Exclusive fullscreen does work, but unfortunately breaks Cmd-Tab and Mission Control. It's certainly possible to support both the standard macOS windowing model (Desktop-friendly fullscreen) and also expose the full range of resolutions.

[jeanlain]

Indeed, and other games support this without issue. I even think that some source game do.

[jeanlain]

Dota 2 may be one of the very few recent games not supporting high-dpi resolutions. Is there a particular reason for this? Will this be a "won't fix"? I also suspect that enabling high resolutions will also remove the blur effect due to magnification (at 1/2 screen resolution).

[dannyboy90]

Well I'm glad to see they've got it fixed in Artifact, there, you can choose between 2560x1440 and 2560x1440 (Retina) mode.

Wish they could deliver the same fix to Dota as well!

[danginsburg]

Part of the reason we did it for Artifact and not Dota is that Artifact does not support Exclusive Fullscreen where full retina resolutions are supported (Dota does support exclusive FS). I can potentially look at adding the retina modes to windowed as I did on Artifact.

In the meantime, I believe you could force it with -highdpi in your command-line options, although I've not actually tested it with dota. Assuming a windowed/desktop-friendly FS resolution, I believe that should render at the backing scale factor at that res. You won't see any indication in the video settings, that's the part that is missing in Dota.

[dannyboy90]

I can confirm that your suggestion to use -highdpi as a launch option works.

Thanks a bunch!

[jeanlain]

It's not satisfactory IMO, because this option only enables the full res in fullscreen mode. This is too high on my 5K iMac. I prefer playing just below 5k, which cannot be achieved in desktop-friendly fullscreen. What we need is, like in many other games, the same resolutions that exclusive fullscreen offers in desktop-friendly fullscreen.

[ngan]

@danginsburg jw if there's plans to add retina support for desktop-friendly fullscreen?

[dannyboy90]

@danginsburg jw if there's plans to add retina support for desktop-friendly fullscreen?

Just use the -highdpi launch option.

[ngan]

-highdpi doesn’t seem to work for desktop friendly fullscreen.

[hitlye]

I encounted the same issue and the -highdpi worked. It set the resolution as the retina and enabled the desktop-friendly fullscreen mode.

[R0cketpunch]

-highdpi was working fine for me however the latest patch (Dragon's Gift) broke the -highdpi mode.

[nicefour]

Can confirm -hidpi does this work anymore. Also in video.txt hidpi is set on, but still no result

[R0cketpunch]

Is -highdpi working for someone else? Still not working for me. It was working perfectly before the "Dragon's Gift" patch.