High DPI Updates

Windows at its core is a legacy operating system trying to live in a modern world, and at times it shows its age. One area where Windows can quickly show its foundations is when running older applications on modern hardware with a high-resolution display. For a refresher, check out our article on why this is a problem, and how the company was trying to address it.

Windows 10 has made some major strides with High DPI, and many applications have been updated to support Windows per-monitor DPI awareness, but the legacy of Windows, and the lack of a requirement to code for DPI awareness even on a new application, means that many applications will never play nicely. To help combat this, Microsoft introduced a new scaling mechanism that would recognize if applications were not rendering correctly, and step in to address the scaling. It doesn’t work for every application, but the success has been good enough that with Windows 10 1903, this option is now on by default. This feature was first added with the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, so clearly there’s enough data now that they feel comfortable enabling this by default. If you’d like a refresher on the enhanced DPI scaling, we looked at it when it first launched.

My personal experience with the enhanced scaling is that it does work well, and this seems like a smart change to address applications that will likely never become DPI aware on their own. In 2019, when high-resolution is no longer a rare feature, this is really something that has become necessary. It should also reduce the number of times you see the pop-up letting you know its intervened, which, while useful, was likely something a lot of users didn’t really understand.

In addition, Task Manager now offers a new column you can select in the Details tab which will show you the DPI awareness of every running process, letting you know if they don’t support DPI scaling, or if they only support System level, per-monitor, or the latest per-monitor v2 specs.

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  • Drazick - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link

    No, it is not the AV only.
    Again, have a look at Phoronix. They disable the AV and many other things before testing and still the IO and Filesystem of Windows is way slower than Linux.

    I think it even gets funnier as VM of Windows on Linux has better IO / File System performance than Windows.
  • Ratman6161 - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link

    Are you sure you aren't actually encountering a hardware limitation? I.e. filling up the drive's SLC cache so it reverts back to its native performance? this is particularly problematic on cheap drives and especially on cheap drives that are approaching full.
  • CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - link

    No, Phoronx, a well respected blogger, has pointed out these differences often.
  • CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 29, 2019 - link

    For example Phoronix just recently posted: "Linux Still Yields Better Multi-Threaded Performance On AMD Threadripper Against Windows 10 May 2019 Update"
  • USGroup1 - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link

    More modular Windows <> Reducing memory consumption
  • mikeztm - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link

    Linux file system is a mess. ZFS have license issue and BRTFS is way not finished.

    Even crappy APFS has better position now.
  • Gigaplex - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link

    ZFS is a Unix file system, not a Linux one (though there is a port).
  • PeachNCream - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link

    Instead of waiting around for Win10 to get more Linux-like capabilities, why not just use Linux? I do for pretty much everything I haven't gotten around to doing on a phone these days except for a couple of games for which I keep a Win10 laptop around.
  • Drazick - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link

    Because there are many things I like about Windows:
    1. Visual Studio for Code Development and compilation (IDE).
    2. Adobe Photoshop.
    3. PortableApps stack.

    Windows is great.
    Microsoft just need to make it leaner and faster.
  • HStewart - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link

    Agree on this - and think Microsoft should build a lean mode with minimal extra systems in that is completely configurable on reboot.

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