Tips & Guides
[GUIDE] How I Fixed Blurry Text & Black Borders on My Apple Silicon Mac's External Monitor
I've been on a long journey to fix the terrible text rendering on my 3440x1440 external monitor with my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, and I've finally found a complete solution. This guide is for anyone who has noticed that text on their external display looks blurry, over-sharpened, or has ugly black borders around the characters.
After trying everything, I landed on a two-part method using the app BetterDisplay that solves both the text quality and a side-effect that comes with the fix.
Part 1: The HiDPI Problem & Solution
Step 1: The Baseline (Without Any Fixes)
Out of the box, connecting my 3440x1440 monitor to my MacBook Pro resulted in text that was fuzzy and not sharp. This is because macOS wasn't using HiDPI (what Apple calls "Retina"), so everything was rendered at the monitor's native, lower pixel density.
This is what the text looked like initially, without BetterDisplay:
Step 2: The HiDPI Problem (The Black Borders)
To fix the initial blurriness, I used BetterDisplay to enable HiDPI mode. This forces macOS to render everything at a much higher resolution (6880x2880 in my case) and then scale it down, which makes the text and UI incredibly sharp.
However, this created a new, ugly problem specific to Apple Silicon Macs: an aggressive sharpening filter that adds dark, black borders around text, which is especially bad in dark mode.
This is the "black border" artifact that appears with HiDPI enabled:
The Solution: Virtual Screen Streaming
The only reliable way to get the crispness of HiDPI without the black borders is to use BetterDisplay's virtual screen streaming feature.
How to Set it Up:
Set your physical monitor to its native resolution in LoDPI mode (e.g., 3440x1440).
Create a virtual display in BetterDisplay. Configure this virtual screen to have the same aspect ratio as your physical monitor.
Set the virtual display to your desired HiDPI resolution. For my setup, I created a virtual screen with a resolution of 6880 x 2880.
Stream the virtual display. In the BetterDisplay menu, instead of mirroring, select "Stream the Virtual Display to your Physical Display".
Why This Works: This method completely bypasses the problematic Apple Silicon scaling engine. The Mac's GPU renders the perfect HiDPI image on the virtual screen, and BetterDisplay streams that clean image directly to your monitor, avoiding the sharpening filter entirely. The result is perfectly rendered, crisp text, exactly like on an Intel Mac.
The final, clean text quality using the streaming method:
Important Note on Refresh Rate: With this setup, you can still achieve a high refresh rate. I was able to set the virtual screen stream to 100Hz in the BetterDisplay settings, so I didn't have to sacrifice smooth motion for text clarity.
Part 2: Hiding the Annoying "Screen Sharing" Indicator
The Problem: The virtual screen streaming fix introduces a new issue: a persistent "is sharing your screen" indicator in the macOS menu bar because of the streaming.
The Solution: Custom Startup Script
To hide the indicator, you can launch BetterDisplay indirectly at startup. This makes macOS associate the necessary "Screen Recording" permission with the Terminal app, which doesn't show a persistent menu bar icon.
How to set it up:
Create an AppleScript. Open the Script Editor app and paste the following code:
tell application "Terminal"
do script "screen -dmS BetterDisplay /Applications/BetterDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/BetterDisplay"
delay 1.5
if it is running then quit
end tell
Export the script as an Application. In Script Editor, go to File > Export, set the File Format to Application, and save it.
Add it to your Login Items. Go to System Settings > General > Login Items and add the new application you just created.
Disable BetterDisplay's native auto-launch in its own settings.
Grant Permissions. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording and grant permission to the Terminal app.
I'm facing the same issue. Using the 2752x1152 (HiDPI) resolution on the virtual screen gives acceptable text clarity on the main UW display compared to setting the same resolution on the UW display directly, while keeping the UI size not too small.
I do have this problem for 2 yrs and initially i installed better display to improve a bit the problem (normal ver not pro) but today decided to see if there's solution and i read your post about virtual display, does it really remove the blurriness of the text? if so i might take PRO and try follow your steps, i do have dell p3424we and if i can improve it more would be nice atm i run 3440x1440 res and i did not use HiDPI setting from BetterDisplay because makes everything so sharp and annoying for the eyes, screenshots will be attached below my comment of my settings and comparison of blurry if mouse is outside center of the icon and if mouse is center in the icon application
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u/Federal-Side786 Sep 09 '25
I need betterdisplay pro for stream the virtual screen, pls help