Scaling Windows - The DPI Arms Race
by Brett Howse on April 15, 2014 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 8.1
- High DPI
Final Words
Windows has always had the burden of bringing forward legacy APIs and code to allow applications designed for previous versions to continue to operate on newer releases. It also supports a huge number of display sizes, screen resolutions, and form factors. Because of this, it often struggles when major changes are introduced. One such change was the new security model in Windows Vista where (finally) users were no longer administrators by default, and another such change is ultra-high resolution displays with the different goal of improving image quality rather than just increasing usable real estate on the desktop.
Windows 8.1 now officially has three different states for applications: DPI-Unaware, System DPI-Aware, and Per-Monitor DPI-Aware, and solutions are in place to handle all three. It also has a fourth unofficial state: DPI-Unaware masquerading as DPI-Aware applications. Unfortunately there is no current solution for these unofficial applications.
One interim solution would be to have a way to force such applications to scale up, and therefore ignore the DPI-aware flag set in the executable. This would allow DPI Virtualization to scale the applications as needed. This is certainly not ideal, but when you are dealing with a product like Windows with such an enormous catalog of applications, it’s necessary because many of these applications will never be updated to correct scaling issues. The correct solution is to have applications updated to take advantage of the High DPI systems to provide a better user experience, but again this doesn’t really work for legacy applications.
One of the problems holding developers back is that there have been few high resolution devices on the market, meaning few developers would even bother taking the time to correct these issues. Now that there are finally devices from virtually every single computer maker with high PPI panels, there is a market force that will hopefully pressure developers into using best coding practices for scaling DPI.
But what about the current state of things –is it worth avoiding High DPI devices until more applications work properly? My personal experience is no, it’s not worth avoiding them. This will of course depend on what applications you use, but the advantage of a high resolution display is that you can always set the resolution lower if necessary as a workaround on applications like Photoshop. The advantage is that in other applications, you can get very crisp, clear text and a fantastic display for media. Within the next year, I would imagine most major Win32 applications that are actively being developed will have to address these issues. When Apple launched the Retina MacBooks, its catalog of applications took some time to be updated; as that happens for Windows applications, the investment in a High DPI system will make even more sense.
The final piece of the puzzle is the next iteration of Windows. Already shown at BUILD were Modern apps running in a windowed mode on the desktop. These apps will of course have no issues scaling with DPI, providing the ideal “one size fits all” approach to DPI scaling. Figuring out a similar solution for legacy applications on the desktop may be a bit more difficult, but it’s certainly something Microsoft is working to address. Time will tell how well they manage to do so.
Sources:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd464659(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn469266(v=vs.85).aspx
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Brett Howse - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
You should do the math - 1280x1024 @ 17" is 96 DPI (called out in the article) and 1600x1200 @ 21" is also exactly 96 DPI.So not high DPI. Even going down a couple inches on screen size isn't going to change the DPI much.
MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Interestingly enough, I had an Acer "Centrino" laptop circa 2004 that I believe had a 14" screen at 1280x1024. I remember needing to use 125% scaling. It was my first high DPI experience.solraun - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Great article! Thank you for calling out Adobe. But you are right, they are probably working overtime for a solution.One important point though:
The resolution dictates how much detail any screen can display. The screen size determines how far away you want to be.
Actual dpi is unimportant.
The bigger the screen, the further away you will want to use it. The actual field of view, or angle, that the screen represents in for your eye stays the same. Sit in front of your monitor, then take out your smart phone and place it in the distance you would normally use it, but in front of the monitor. It will mostly match the outlines of the monitor.
So for me, if I am using 1080p on my 24'' screen or 1080p on my 5'' smartphone: it is the same number of pixels per degree of my view.
Similarly, I just bought a 4k 24'' screen, and while many people say 4k makes only sense on bigger displays, I disagree. I would have to sit further away from a 30'' monitor, and I don't have the space.
I
bountygiver - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
that's why windows 8.1 has a feature that solve this.It queries the dpi and screen size and calculate the viewing distance and decide how it scales.
And I love how it scales real time when you move the apps across different monitors.
Taracta - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Adobe, with postscript and PDF (especially PDF which was meant to scale from the 10s of DPI on monitors to thousands of DPI on printing presses) in their portfolio that were meant to scale with DPI and their applications don't scale properly! RIDICULOUSNESS!bengildenstein - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
What? We're now giving Apple sole credit for the trend to improve mobile screen resolutions? Utterly preposterous.The DPI race did not "begin" with the iPhone 4. Screen resolutions (and by direct implication PPI/DPIs -- given a fixed screen area) have been steadily increasing over time, with Android devices showing a far smoother increase curve than the single iPhone "retina" release. Additionally the increase in resolution requires a larger industry of components to support them. And smartphone resolutions continue to increase while the iPhone screen remains stagnant at a sub-HD resolution.
I'm not arguing whether Apple is influential. But I think it's high-time that we stop crediting them with creating innovations that have already happened and were trending at the time of their release.
Taracta - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Apple deserve the credit for the increase in DPI and screen resolutions. Without Apple you would not have had the Android device push ever higher DPI and laptops with now 4K screens. The only thing that was happening was the defaulting of resolutions to 1080p because of HDTV but DPI was actually going down as you were just getting bigger and bigger 1080p monitors. Actually 1080p was a regression from the 1920X1200 monitors that had existed before!So yes, Apple deserve the credit for starting the trend of increasing DPI and resolution.
evonitzer - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
In the phone space, not exactly. The OG iPhone, 3G, and 3GS were all 320x480 devices (165ppi). Meanwhile, Android phones had bumped their way up to 480x800 and 480x854 (265ppi @ 3.7"). The 3GS was released in June 2009, and 4-5 months later the OG Droid came out with a higher resolution. Then in June 2010 Apple released the iPhone 4, which further bumped up the resolution to 'retina', or 330 ppi. I'm not sure when the first 720P Android phone came out, but roughly 16 months later, Android phones matched the 330ppi and have kept going up.So I dunno. Perhaps the Android manufacturers would have stagnated without Apple countering them in 2010, but I would suggest that Android phones were pressuring Apple to improve and so they did. Push and pull from good competition. Who deserves the credit?
Brett Howse - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
It's all about marketing. The "Retina" branding of the screens worked with consumers.You could say the same about the Touch ID. Not the first phone with a fingerprint sensor, but certainly the first one that average consumers would know about.
In tech, it's rarely about who gets to market first, but more about who resonates with consumers with a product and in these two cases I'd argue Apple did that.
They are not always the product innovators, but sometimes they are the ones that get average people to know enough to ask about an innovation.
hackbod - Wednesday, April 16, 2014 - link
If you think us having high density displays in mobile today owes *anything* to Apple, you are delusional. This would have happened without Apple lifting a finger, it was *already* happening without them, and was actually happening long before the iPhone came out.Android devices were clearly increasing screen densities first, and in the Android world as soon as that happened, the platform had the full extensive density support it has today that allows seamless scaling down and up in density, to 320dpi and beyond, without changes to applications (once they were tweaked to be compatible with the implementation in Android 1.6, which was even a bit before the Droid). Nobody needed to push this along: screen resolution has *always* been one of those marketing numbers manufacturers use to convince people that their hardware is better, and in fact for the densities we are talking about here this is one of the more useful numbers because its impact is clearly visible right on the screen. The fact that they continue to push screen densities up to 480dpi and beyond pretty clearly shows that nobody needed Apple to make up a word and act like they were the Big Innovator in order to spur things on.
But this was all happening well before Android or the iPhone. This increase in screen density actually happened well before that, in the Palm device world, with the introduction double density (160dpi) screens on Palm devices and support in that platform for scaling based on density. In fact this experience with how important it is to handle multiple densities on mobile devices had a big impact on the design of Android, planning for this from the start and thus having better intrinsic support for it.
If you are actually familiar at all with the development of the mobile market, I think it is pretty clear that this increase in density is actually some intrinsic aspect to this market compared to what happened in desktops. There are probably a lot of reasons for this; for example, mobile screens can't really grow in size so increases in screen pixels need to be done as density increases rather than screen size increases, and these screens are starting at a much lower resolution so the simple 2x jump in density is a lot easier (keep in mind that 2x screen density means 4x the pixels to render, and when you are talking about desktop screens starting from their current resolutions that actually pushes you up in to resolutions that are pretty expensive to drive).
Thinking that Apple had anything to do with pushing this part of the industry just shows a severe lack of knowledge about the history of the mobile market.