The IT Nerd

I am beginning to think that I should have stayed on macOS Sonoma. I say that because that hot off posting this issue with Sequoia comes a new issue. If you have a monitor that has the ability to do variable refresh rates, this may not work on Sonoma. For example my new BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX Monitor which had no issues doing variable refresh rates when I was running Sonoma can no longer do variable refresh rates in Sequoia. Instead, I found it to be locked to 144Hz in my case.

Now I know that it’s not the monitor because I grabbed a PC laptop that I had in my office and tested variable refresh rate support, and it worked fine. I also tested the same scenario on my wife’s Mac which runs Sonoma, and that worked fine as well. And while researching this, I found a single post that sounds similar to what I am experiencing.

And:

Reading through this, it seems like this is some sort of regression as this apparently worked in Sequoia 15 and 15.0.1 which implies that this might be a regression. But it could also be Apple deliberately limiting support for variable refresh rates and HDR along with it as described here and here. At this point, it’s not clear which it is. But as more people discover this, more people will not be happy. Especially if they have a MacBook Pro and are used to ProMotion which is Apple’s implementation of variable refresh rates. To work around this, I have set my refresh rate to 100 Hz at 2560×1440 resolution which gives me the added advantage of being able to use the option of having my MacBook Pro render slightly sharper text while using HDR. And I will be retesting this when Sequoia 15.2 comes out as I am hoping that it will address this issue.

Have you experienced this issue? If so, post a comment below and share your experience.

This entry was posted on November 5, 2024 at 8:29 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.