I discovered a thread where someone got HIDPI working, but I’m unable to apply the same fix/workaround in Ardour 7.1 on macOS.
Thread: high resolution displays - #7 by blubee
Seeing that it works, I suspect I need to configure something…
Occurs on macOS Ventura aarch64 / screen resolution 3024 x 1964
The application wide zoom options are only available on Windows and Linux. On macOS, apple libraries scaling the application automagically per screen (not per application).
Ardour’s editor canvas is intentional exempt from Retina scaling (each pixel will become a 2x2 block for performance reasons). The mixer and everything else however are rendered wit HiDPI resolution.
You can force the editor to scale by setting an environment variable.
ARDOUR_NSGL=0 disables using openGL (an NSOpenGLContext).
By default NSGL is enabled and the editor is rendered in software onto an openGL texture. This sidesteps Apple’s color-correction which is rather expensive and slows down rendering the editor on some systems (Reaper uses the same trick Justin Frankel - main feed).
Without an intermediate GL surface, the editor is rendered like the rest of Ardour, directly onto an Apple NSView (which scales automatically).
(ARDOUR_BUNDLED=1 is needed to launch Ardour from a terminal, and make Ardour believe that you opened the .app application bundle with all resources below Content/).