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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kasakka - Sunday, April 20, 2014 - link
Many monitors and TVs have reportedly messed up EDID data so it's probably not completely reliable.invinciblegod - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Now that I think about it, how would you side swipe with a windowed modern app (to access settings)? Would you sideswipe the application or the edge of the panel? If it's the edge of the panel, that would be sort of weird since it's not part of the window (ironically, Mac users would not find this dichotomy confusing as they already have one in the Menu bar).Brett Howse - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Always swipe the right side to access settings.If you have two metro apps (or more) open an snapped, it will do settings for the active (last used) window. If you're not sure which is active, the bar in between the two (or more) metro apps will have three dots and a bar, with the bar always on the side of the active app.
Brett Howse - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
To specifically answer your question about windowed - obviously we're not sure yet what they will do but I imagine it will be the same as now with the active window having the settings but we won't know until we see some bits from Windows 9.Laststop311 - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
poor dpi scaling has kept me away from high dpi notebooks. I'm hoping for an alienware 18" m18x with gtx 980m 20nm flagship maxwell in sli and a 4k ips screen. Even tho my personally upgraded m18x r1 is still goin strong with 4.2ghz core i7-2960xm + gtx 680m sli the massive battery gains i will get going to 1st gen 14nm broadwell + 1st gen 20nm maxwell from 2nd gen 32nm sandy bridge + 1st gen 28nm will make it worth it. Just hope sli gtx 980m is enough to game in 4k on at least 1 step below ultra settingsAntronman - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
If you actually want an alienware, you don't the first thing about technology.Here, let me fill you in:
Alienwares = Overpriced, underperforming Dells.
bznotins - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
I tried running Win8 in VM on a 13" MBP and even with the tweaks noted in this article, Chrome still doesn't look half as good as it does in OSX. I have no idea if this is a Win8 problem or a Chrome problem (or both), but regardless it keeps me from considering a high DPI Windows laptop. Or even running Win8 fulltime on my MBP. Hopefully they get it fixed at some point in the future.Accord99 - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
Chrome probably, it used to work well in HiDPI back late last year but something that Google did broke Chrome completely for a period of time, then only partially fixed.I don't care too much because I prefer using Firefox which works well.
darthrevan13 - Wednesday, April 16, 2014 - link
It also could be the VM driver. It looks okay on a native windows machine with high DPIrxzlmn - Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - link
How about the other side of the high DPI development, hardware scaling? I have read multiple times on forums that high DPI screens would often not be able to properly scale down to a lower native resolution (i.e. that is an exact fraction of the original resolution), due to internal electronics still doing some kind of interpolation instead of pixel binning.For instance, I plan to buy a 4K laptop in the near future (the Lenovo Y50 probably), and one point why I want 4K and not 3K or something else is, that 4K would be able to natively scale down to both 720p (for games) and 1080p (for desktop stuff that is not usable via Windows DPI setting, yes, I'm looking at you Adobe).
Does anyone have any insight on whether a 4K display on a notebook would use pixel binning to scale down? Or not? And if so, why, and will this be an issue that is intrinsic to the monitor, or somehow be tweakable by SW?