Scrivener at 120 Hz Refresh Rate

So, I looked around to see if anyone asked this, and I couldn’t find anything. If it has been already discussed, then my apologies in advanced for reiterating a topic.

Anyways, my question, is I have screen that has a refresh rate of 144 hz (in Monterrey my refresh rate caps at 120 hz). Most recently it came to my attention many major apps, haven’t incorporated any ProMotion (120 Hz) modifications to their experience. It’s difficult to tell, but is Scrivener refreshing at 120 hz, when used on either ProMotion displays or 120 hz external monitors? Or is this the sort of thing that app developers have no control over? Like is it something that MacOS caps in lieu of the app itself. Just curious is all. I mean I’m fine with my experience, just wondering if my display is getting its bang for its buck.

I don’t know the answer to your question. I’ve never before heard of native desktop software (outside of stuff that operates at a determined FPS, again like games and videos, which are usually capped by their capture speed) needing to support a high refresh rate setup. I suppose maybe some outliers may be stuff like Electron that run animations inside a browser-like environment, or anything else that isn’t native like that. Whatever the case, none of that would be applicable to Scrivener. It should be taking advantage of whatever capability the OS itself is providing to its development frameworks. I could be wrong, and I’ve heard anecdotal stories about how macOS is a bit more spotty in support (speaking at the system level, like some animations not seeming to run at +60hz) than other systems, but how true any of that is, I don’t know.

In web-browsers it’s noticable. I mean, silky-smooth scrolling is a benefit to the web browsing experience. But I just can’t tell with Scrivener. Maybe my eyes are just getting old!

This (2021) video mentions “full screen apps” (and games) exclusively on macOS, so it might be outdated already, but maybe interesting anyways: Optimize for variable refresh rate displays - WWDC21 - Videos - Apple Developer

Yeah that’s mainly going to be pertinent to gaming, where the source FPS is changing a lot and to avoid “tearing” of the image on the screen, you want to keep the screen’s refresh rate synchronised with what the graphics card is putting out. If your Mac is dropping frame rate output when sliding a sheet down or scrolling text, then a 144hz monitor is overkill for it anyway. A simple test is dragging a window around as fast as you can. If it stays looking like a rectangle the whole time, you’re fine.

In the end it comes down to Apple offering the frameworks to implement high frame rates in general desktop applications or handle this stuff automatically (in the same way a dev doesn’t have to worry about 30 or 60 FPS right now). Last time I checked, they didn’t even “upgrade” all of their own apps.

One thing I noticed about apps that generally aren’t modified for promotion/120 hz is pdf documents. The effect is quite noticable in that, text tends to frizzle as you scroll up and down. least that’s how it is for me.

I can’t really tell with scrivener for now. I mean, when I scroll up and down really quickly, it looks no different then it does on my other regular 60 hz screen. This would tell me that Scrivener isn’t optimized…yet.

Again, it’s not a big thing, but this I guess probably should go in the wishlist section if my deduction is correct.

Sounds like a good idea. If the video above is any indication, it will be fairly easy to implement if and when Apple is ready and I suppose way less work than… say the transition to “retina” screens.

I’m not sure what the procedure is but is it my responsibility to formally start this discussion in the “wishlist” section, or is that the job of the moderator?

My deepest apologies in advance for starting this issue in the wrong section.

Anyways, having a silky-smooth Scrivener experience with a nice refresh rate is I’m sure a feature most would like…alas, it seems at this point not in the control of the developers but rather will Apple.

You’re good! There is a #wishlist tag for a reason. Having a separate board just for that is a legacy hold-over from the older forum that doesn’t really make much sense any more, but it’s kind of there out of tradition I suppose. The old forum had no tags, and thus required a great confusing proliferation of sub-sub-categories that kind of split the community into platform-specific areas for things even so mundane as posting compliments or complaints. That was okay back when Scrivener for Windows was hugely different, but these days hardly anything requires platform-specific discussion save for bug reports and stuff like this.

The tag is better, as one can use the tag in the main Scrivener area, for general requests like actual features, and like you did in platform-specific sub-categories if the request is something that is only relevant to Mac, Win or iOS.

Hey hope all are well!

Seems Scrivener doesn’t use or work at 120fps on new macs with ProMotion displays, or any 120fps display connected to a Mac.

It still continues to scroll at 60fps.

Would be great to utilize the 120fps which comes default on new MacBook Pros!