High DPI (QHD, UHD, 4k, 5k) Application Support

ltickett

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2000
Messages
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Quite surprised not to see a sticky in here about applications that do/don't handle HiDPI well. Am I looking in the wrong place? Is there a good resource somewhere else for this?

I've just recently started using a Dell Inspiron 15 (with 4k UHD display). A large number of my applications handle the high DPI well, but some that still majorly struggle;

SQL Management Studio
Outlook (the UI is fairly good, but any marketing/html e-mails are severely malformed)
Adobe Photoshop (I just found there is actually a configuration option in the software to scale the UI 200%)
Remote Desktop Connection
Windows Media Player
VLC

Thanks
 
How are you making the 4K resolution easily readable? Are you adjusting it in Windows?
 
Yes simply adjusting the scaling in windows (but the applications have to support it).

I've found numerous blog posts about it, but I guess I was hoping there'd be a forum with a maintained post and interaction. I'll keep hunting.
 
HiDPI on the Windows desktop is a mess and will continue to be so. A lot of apps will never get proper support.

The 'saving grace' ironically is ModernUI (Metro) which is natively HiDPI-aware.
 
HiDPI on the Windows desktop is a mess and will continue to be so. A lot of apps will never get proper support.

The 'saving grace' ironically is ModernUI (Metro) which is natively HiDPI-aware.

Perhaps?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9274/windows-10-build-10122-released-to-fast-ring

Anandtech said:
Buried in the fixed issues though is something else that caught my eye. “We have fixed issues where fonts would render blurry on High DPI displays. We’re cooking up a blog post we plan to publish shortly that talks a little more in depth about our investment with High DPI in Windows 10 so watch for it.“

High DPI has been an issue on Windows for some time now. It is a big enough issue that I wrote a post explaining what is going on. The Windows 8 Start Screen and app model has solved high DPI issues on Windows, but that is only for new apps found in the store. Existing Win32 apps for the desktop can have terrible DPI support, and the native method to scale apps up can easily be overwritten by the developer even if they do not support High DPI. Hopefully Windows 10 brings some solutions to this issue. Even many of Microsoft’s own apps can have issues, so leaving this for the developer to correct might be asking a lot. I will eagerly wait to see what this blog post has to offer us, and hopefully it is good news.
 
Scaling for legacy apps has definitely improved in recent builds of Windows 10.

It's still not anywhere near as good as the Mac's scaling, but it's a noticeable improvement.
 
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