High DPI Displays

I've made several posts around high DPI displays and am proud to announce that every display I use on a regular basis now are high DPI (> 150), both at home at work.

The main issue is what I call DWM blurry scaling. Applications that don't declare themselves to be DPI aware may be scaled up using a bitmap scaling algorithm that makes them appear fuzzy. To counter this, you can right-click on the executable, choose properties, select the "Compatibility" tab, and choose "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings".

One of two things will happen: (a) it will just work and be scaled reasonably, or (b) it will be really really tiny. In the case of (b), see if there is an option in the application itself for high DPI support. Recently Adobe has added scaling options for its UI, so this is exactly the type of thing to look for.

The main deficiency seems to be mixed scaling factors. For a brief time I tried multi-mon with the main 4k monitor at 150% and the UDH one at 100%. This was a spectacular failure where applications that have shown they can render at 100% (1:1 pixels) since the beginning of time fall apart when shown on the UHD monitor.

It's been slow progress, but we've come a long way. I can't help but credit progress to phones and tablets that set expectations.