On a non-retina display (Mac), my CATextLayer instances produce text that is blurrier than what I get with NSAttributedString's -drawAtPoint:
See for yourself:
At the top, a CATextLayer instance (contentsScale property is 1.0, which corresponds to the screen's pixel density), at the bottom, the result of NSAttributedString's -drawAtPoint:. Both use the same font and colour.
Changing the allowsFontSubpixelQuantization property of CATextLayer doesn't make any noticeable difference.
If I set the layer's contentsScale to 2.0, the text becomes sharper. But there may be something I missed, because I'm not supposed to set this to 2.0 on a non-retina display, am I?
Note: on a retina display, the difference in sharpness is also noticeable, but less so.
This is on macOS 12.