Mac Retina support causes huge frame rate drop

Hi all,

I am experience a low frame rate on my Macbook Pro in just very simple Unity projects with only a camera and light. Interestingly enough, when I drag the running build from my retina screen to an attached old Apple Cinema Display 20", the frame rate increases almost twice. The same happens when I disable ‘Mac Retina Support’ in the Player settings. See attachments.

One call is taking very long on the retina screen (about 90ms, >90%): Render Camera > Final Blit Pass > Gfx.DrawDynamic > PrepareRenderTarget. That same call is just < 30ms on my Cinema Display.

What is the purpose if this ‘Mac retina support’ feature? I think I need it because disabling it results in poor quality. However, I don’t want this bad frame rate. Any ideas?

Thanks already!

Computer specs: Macbook Pro 13" early 2015, Retina 3.1Ghz Dual core i7, 16GB ram, Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536MB).

It’s quite simple. When retina support is disabled, the entire game/app is rendered at a half resolution and then upscaled by 2x. Enabling retina support means your rendering resolution is doubled, putting a lot more strain on your GPU.

how did you disable Retina display

You can disable retina display by going to:
Edit → Project Settings → Player → Resolution and Presentation -->uncheck the Mac Retina Support option
This is on Unity 2019.4 and presumably other versions too.

Thank you