MacBook Notch Gaming Is an Absolute Visual Catastrophe

Hello everyone. Let’s talk about the ever-thrilling world of gaming on a MacBook with a notch – the kind of experience that feels like paying extra for a medical malpractice procedure. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has managed to design laptops so beautiful they deserve an art gallery exhibit, and yet they still can’t handle something as basic as rendering a circle without it looking like it’s been flattened by a steamroller. Bravo, Cupertino, you’ve outdone yourselves once again.

The Core Problem: Blurry, Squashed Gaming

Here’s the dirty truth: if you’re playing a fullscreen game on a MacBook with a notch, your game is probably blurry. Why? Because Apple’s API logic is about as consistent as a drunk surgeon trying to perform heart surgery with a Wii Nunchuck. The system dutifully spits out a list of resolutions – but mixes the correct ones with the wrong ones. And guess what most games pick? The wrong bloody one, of course. Congratulations, you’ve now got ellipses where circles should be, and a full-price AAA game looking fuzzier than a pirated VHS tape of the 1980s.

Oh, and let’s not forget the delightful fact that this issue has been reported to Apple since September 2023. Naturally, the company famous for selling $19 polishing cloths has done absolutely nothing about it. A company valued at trillions can’t figure out how to return a filtered list of screen resolutions without confusing developers. Amazing.

Safe Areas, Full Screen Areas, and Other Jargon Nonsense

Now, if you love needless complexity, you’ll adore Apple’s system for handling the notch. Developers don’t just get one region to worry about. Oh no, they get three!

• Full Bounds of the Display: The whole screen, including areas you can’t actually draw to. Useless.
• Safe Area: The region under the notch. You know, the “zone of don’t panic” for developers desperately trying to make sure their HUD isn’t hidden by Apple’s design genius.
• Full Screen App Area: Slightly different from the safe area, but close enough to be confusing. Because why give you one logical boundary when three will do?

If that sounds like a conspiracy to waste developer time, it’s because it probably is. The game engine dutifully picks from a list of resolutions – but hey, let’s mix impossible ones in there too, just to keep things spicy. It’s like choosing your favorite weapon loadout in a shooter, only half of them are airsoft guns, and the game never tells you which is which.

Games Affected by This Madness

The casualties of Apple’s notch apocalypse are many, and they’re not small titles either. Here’s a short roll call of victims:

• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Congratulations, your Lara Croft is now squashed flatter than a pancake.
• No Man’s Sky: Still magnificent in scope, but apparently infinite squashing is part of the aesthetic now.
• Riven: Defaults to a blurry mess. Good luck solving ancient puzzles when everything looks like it’s viewed through a dirty microscope.
• Stray: Resolution defaults to “completely wrong,” so even the cat looks like it went through a funhouse mirror.

To be fair, some developers seem to have figured it out. Cyberpunk 2077– notorious for breaking PCs at launch – somehow defaults to the correct resolution on a Mac. Imagine that: CD Projekt Red, a studio that once turned Night City into the world’s most expensive slideshow, managed to accomplish what Apple itself could not.

World of Warcraft also gets an honorable mention, though mostly because it’s old enough to still be using APIs that bypass Apple’s “helpful” modern system. Sometimes being a fossil has its perks, clearly.

The So-Called Solutions

If you’re a gamer, the fix is simple: manually choose a 16:10 resolution. You know, the kind of thing your game should have done for you in the first place. Nothing screams “premium Mac experience” like having to babysit your settings menu every time you start a game.

If you’re a developer, the band-aid solution involves filtering resolutions against the “safe area” and hacking around the API like some back-alley geneticist performing unsanctioned experiments. Sure, it might cut out a few options like 4:3, but who cares? At least your game won’t look like a Picasso painting when it’s supposed to look like realism.

And ultimately, this is Apple’s mess to clean up. Whether it’s updating their Human Interface Guidelines (which conveniently avoid the notch problem entirely), improving APIs to just return useful damn resolutions, or creating a half-decent game-centric API at all, the burden here falls squarely on a company that loves to market its hardware to creatives but consistently forgets that video games exist outside of Angry Birds.

Final Diagnosis

Gaming on a Mac is, once again, a reminder that Apple treats games like an embarrassing rash – it’s there, but they’d rather not talk about it. Blurry, squashed images, confusing APIs, and “solutions” that amount to “do it yourself” illustrate perfectly how little effort Apple invests here. It’s medical malpractice in the gaming world: they’ve got the tools to fix it, but instead they’re prescribing sugar pills and pretending everything’s fine.

The overall impression? Bad. Not just mildly bad – but fundamentally, structurally, embarrassingly bad. And unless Apple decides to pull its head out of its overpriced eco-friendly packaging, Mac gaming will remain what it’s always been: a second-class, half-baked, blurry afterthought.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Article source: Blurry rendering of games on Mac, https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/your-mac-game-is-probably-rendering-blurry/