Samsung Odyssey G9 49″ Monitor macOS Settings

I picked up this monster size monitor a year ago. It is truly ginormous and gives me plenty of screen real estate. I had it hooked up to my MacBook and everything worked perfectly fine until I upgraded macOS to Ventura and lost the Scaling option under display settings. After that, the display was all messed up, and I spent a lot of time searching on the internet what to do here. If you landed on this post through Google, I can save you some time. Also, this post will help solve washed colors in HDR mode.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get pixel perfect high DPI enabled on macOS Ventura:

  • Download BetterDisplay. This utility will allow you to make this monitor work as it should with Ventura. Be ready to spend $15 for Pro version after the trial, and it is truly worth it
  • Use the following settings under Displays tab of BetterDisplay settings

You may need to restart your computer

  • Enable High Dynamic Range (HDR) in macOS Display Settings. Use 120 Hertz as refresh rate. As of writing of this post, there isn’t a way to get 240 Hertz working
  • Now in BetterDisplay, choose the highest HiDPI option, which as of writing of this post is 3840×1080. If you prefer the 5120×1440 then currently no HiDPI option for that, so choose the LoDPI setting
  • Then finally, use the following Image Adjustments. You may need to play around to see what soothes your eyes, but these ones worked for me, and made the display looks extremely good.

That’s it! Drop a comment if this post helped you, or if you had more to say on this subject.

PS, if you want to see the monitor settings, those are below:

  • Game mode
    • Refresh Rate – 240
    • Response Time – Fastest
    • Adaptive Sync – Off
    • Virtual Aim Point – Off
    • Screen Size – Auto
  • Picture
    • Brightness – 100
    • Contrast – 75
    • Sharpness – 20
    • Color – Normal
  • System
    • Local Dimming – Auto

8 thoughts on “Samsung Odyssey G9 49″ Monitor macOS Settings

  1. Thank you for your guide. How do you find font sharpness at this resolution? Is it better or worse vs windows 11 scaled at 150% for example? I just bought mac mini and i use usb-c to dp1.4 but no matter scaling i choose – fonts do not seem to be as crisp as windows… And no, i cant get HiDPi using switchres somehow… I will attempt tonight. Your response is highly appreciated.. thanks!
    alex

    • I don’t have an experience of SwitchRes so can’t speak to that. As you can read from my post, in BetterDisplay, there are clear HiDPI options available. They have a trial version you can use to see if it works. I also don’t have Windows 11 to try it out with. Lastly, 3 days after I posted it, I found a great deal for Studio Display, and ended up buying it :-D. This Samsung monitor alas is no longer in use. Studio Display is very high quality that matches MacBook’s crispness, but I miss the screen real estate of Samsung.

  2. thanks for this! What was your impression on font quality after you applied that HiDpi resolution and now with Studio Display? I wish there would be two screenshots… 🙂
    Thanks again for replying
    alex

  3. just wanted to provide an update – i tried above method on mac mini m2 plus neo g9 using better display – and could not get this resolution to appear in HiDPI option list. Not sure what to try… I am on latest Ventura

  4. I am sorry is your macbook has a Pro chip? I read on better display github description the following:
    “The maximum horizontal pixel count is constrained on the entry-level M1 configurations to 6K (on M1 Pro/Max/Ultra to 8K) which might pose an issue to ultra-wide display users trying to go beyond a certain horizontal resolution.”

  5. Hi,

    After installed BetterDisplay and following all your steps I rebooted my laptop (MacBook Pro M1 Max) and now the screen does not come on anymore, it show the mac display for a second, than goes black with message “no signal”.

    I also don’t have that 3840×1080 @120Hz show as an option.

    Anyone know what to do now? The screen was working fine before BetterDisplay with all these options..

  6. Tested with Neo G9. Still not perfect as windows or Linux but kind of ok. 5k is not looking good fonts are still blury 3840×1080 is still best option from quality perspective.

  7. Hello Vikram. Thank you for this guide. I was racking my head as to how to bloody fix the OLED G9 misbehaving on my M3 Mac and if I had known BetterDisplay would just work, I could’ve saved so much time. I was thinking this was a cable issue (went through 6 cables), but this is squarely on Apple. I can finally have 5120×1440 show up as the default resolution which is what I want for games but resolution set to 3840×1080 which is what I have for productivity. One thing to note is that with the M3, the G95SC and Sonoma, 240Hz is supported at both the resolutions I just mentioned. Thanks again!

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