After a dock, a KVM or a wake from sleep, macOS quietly parks displays on a mode that renders bigger than the panel and shrinks it back down. Display Upscale finds those, puts them on a 1:1 mode, and keeps them there.
Free forever tier · Pro $19/yr or $39 once · no account, no telemetry.
Both halves are the same artwork. The left one is rendered at a framebuffer bigger than the panel and resampled down — which is what macOS silently does after a dock, a KVM or a wake from sleep.
Every mode your displays report, including the HiDPI ones System Settings hides. For each, whether the framebuffer matches the panel's real pixel grid — or is larger, and being resampled down.
The sharpest mode at the UI size you are already using. Not a bigger desktop, not smaller text — the same layout, rendered so one rendered pixel lands on one physical pixel.
Sleep, a dock, a KVM, a resolution a game changed and never changed back. The agent notices the reconfiguration and puts it right, usually before you have finished logging in.
Free is the diagnosis and the manual fix. Pro is the part that runs without you.
`dsp doctor` ranks every fault it can find — downscaled displays, contrast pinned at the top of its range and clipping highlights, an EDID override you forgot was installed, a monitor whose DDC channel does not answer — and prints the command that fixes each one. Free on every tier.
Compares each mode's framebuffer against the panel's real pixel count. A mode rendering 2048×1152 onto a 1920×1080 panel is flagged as what it is: softer, not sharper.
macOS filters out every mode that duplicates another at a different scale. One options dictionary un-hides them — which is how a Retina-capable mode you were never offered turns up.
Entirely edge-triggered: a display-reconfiguration callback and a wake notification. No polling, no timer, no periodic wake-up. An idle agent uses no measurable CPU.
Name the set of displays in front of you. Undock, redock, and every mode, brightness and contrast comes back — matched on the exact set of panels, so your laptop alone never gets the office desk applied to it.
Tell it the exact mode a given monitor should run, keyed on the panel's own serial. It survives replug, reboot and being moved to a different port.
Brightness, contrast, sharpness and colour over DDC/CI, without the joystick behind the bezel. Every write prints the undo command with the previous value.
For panels macOS refuses to drive at full resolution. It refuses to generate one for a display already running 1:1, because that would cost sharpness rather than add it.
One app, one CLI, one binary. Version 1.1.0, macOS 13 and later.
curl -fsSL https://displayupscale.dfacto.ai/install | bashbrew land with 1.2.0.
Buy it once if you prefer — most people should. Every install starts with 14 days of Pro, no card and no account, and lapses to Free on its own.
Find out which of your displays is soft. Forever.
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Download freeEvery display, sharp, without you thinking about it.
or $2.99/month · $39 once, forever
Start 14-day trialCard checkout opens with 1.2.0.
For desks with more panels than hands.
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No, and any tool that says otherwise is selling you a downscale. A 1920×1080 panel has 1920×1080 physical pixels; nothing in software adds more. What this fixes is the opposite problem — macOS rendering a LARGER framebuffer and resampling it down onto your panel, which makes text softer than the hardware is capable of. On a monitor already running 1:1, the app tells you so and points you at the controls that can still help (DDC sharpness and contrast, font smoothing).
Two cases. First: a display parked on a downscaled mode — very common after a dock, a KVM, an EDID override, or a game that changed resolution. That is a real, visible fix. Second: a panel with more physical pixels than macOS is currently using, where a genuine HiDPI mode exists but was hidden from System Settings. The app only offers the second when the panel truly has the pixels for it.
Those are large, capable toolboxes — virtual screens, per-display colour engines, brightness overlays. This is one job done automatically: detect downscaling and undo it, on every display, forever, without you opening anything. It is a single 250 KB binary and a menu-bar icon, and the CLI is MIT.
Everything diagnostic and everything manual: see every display and every hidden mode, know which ones are downscaled, and fix any of them by hand as often as you like. One display is kept sharp automatically, forever. Pro is what automates the rest — all your displays, pinned profiles, monitor controls and EDID overrides.
Yes — 14 days of Pro, no card and no account. When it ends the app returns to Free. Nothing breaks, nothing nags, and your displays stay exactly where they are.
Completely. Licences are Ed25519-signed tokens verified against a key embedded in the app, so activation is a local signature check. There is no licence server to be down, and no phone-home to block.
macOS 13 and later. Apple Silicon is what everything is tested on; on Intel Macs the mode switching and the agent work, and DDC is reported as unavailable rather than half-working. The full table is in the documentation.
14 days, no questions asked. Email support@dfacto.ai.
The check is free and always will be. Run it, and if every display is already 1:1, the app will tell you that and you can delete it.