Click "Next" to continue enjoying your 4k monitor



  • My work laptop has a 15.6" screen with a 4k resolution. I hate it very much.

    Why? Because DPI scaling works very, very badly.

    Here's are a few examples of the Windows 10 installer trying to be "helpful". Apologies for the literal screenshots but for obvious reasons Print Screen wasn't an option.

    Let's play "spot the 'Next' button":

    0_1458813405045_IMG_20160324_161758.jpg

    Microsoft clearly thinks of people reading their license agreements from 5 kilometres away (guest starring a massive checkbox):

    0_1458814496277_IMG_20160324_162103.jpg

    I have a very large hard drive:

    0_1458813992631_IMG_20160324_162118.jpg


  • area_can

    It really is dumb, isn't it?

    I've never played around with a Mac long enough to confirm, but they seem to have their display scaling down pat - @cartman82 can you confirm?


  • BINNED

    One of the minor-ish ones I noticed on Win10 as well: if you have VPN connections configured they regularly end up above the top of the screen when you open the network list from tray. WiFi networks seem to scroll properly, but anything extra, off the screen it goes!



  • @bb36e said:

    but they seem to have their display scaling down pat - @cartman82 can you confirm?

    How? I only have HD displays.

    Also, I've playing around with Windows 10 the last few weeks, haven't been back to Mac much.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bb36e said:

    I've never played around with a Mac long enough to confirm, but they seem to have their display scaling down pat - @cartman82 can you confirm?

    They do a very good job of it. I believe it helps that their rendering strategy is mostly to render at HD resolution and then downscale. That would suck if your software insists on using one-pixel-wide lines, but Mac apps are discouraged from that, in part by it actually being a bit awkward to determine the size of a pixel. ;)


  • FoxDev

    @Deadfast Windows has never been good at dealing with varying DPIs, although they did manage to get it right on the Surface tablets



  • @RaceProUK said:

    @Deadfast Windows has never been good at dealing with varying DPIs, although they did manage to get it right on the Surface tablets

    I know, compared to previous versions of Windows Windows 10 is working like a dream. It gets especially interesting once you attach a 1080p external monitor via HDMI :(.


  • BINNED

    @Deadfast said:

    15.6" screen with a 4k resolution

    Also, can someone find a legitimate reason for doing this? Who the fuck can use this comfortably without scaling? And if you're going to use scaling all the time, what was the freaking point to begin with?



  • @Onyx said:

    @Deadfast said:

    15.6" screen with a 4k resolution

    Also, can someone find a legitimate reason for doing this? Who the fuck can use this comfortably without scaling? And if you're going to use scaling all the time, what was the freaking point to begin with?

    Images look WAY sharper. Text too. But that's about it. (When a friend was looking for a new computer, I told her point blank that she did not want a 4K monitor. Very few programs get things right. It's even worse when you're second monitor is not scaled. I'm looking at you Adobe!)


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @cartman82 said:

    I've playing around with Windows 10 the last few weeks

    Idiot.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Deadfast said:

    Windows 10 is working like a dream

    You mean the colors are bizarre, none of the shapes mean anything, things show up and disappear at random, you never know how you got to any particular place, and literally nothing make sense?


  • BINNED

    @Lorne-Kates Also, is there any other way to get to freaking Control Panel other than typing control in the search thing? Not that I'm bothered by typing myself but fucking hell, the fancy "Settings" thing is damned near useless and there's like 5 ways to get to it by clicking on stuff, but no Control Panel, anywhere?



  • @dcon said:

    Images look WAY sharper. Text too. But that's about it.

    That, AFAIK, is because that’s the whole point: being able to get resolution close enough to that of printed matter that items on-screen look as crisp as that.



  • @bb36e said:

    ve never played around with a Mac long enough to confirm, but they seem to have their display scaling down pat - @cartman82 can you confirm?

    They do a better job, but they also "cheat": they only do 2x scaling exactly.

    Apple also had the ability to write their entire graphical layer from basically scratch in 2001, after which the lesson: "hey you should try to use vector graphics for everything, and maybe also never assume any particular DPI" was firmly ingrained in the developers. Microsoft has never had the opportunity to make a clean break like that, not since 1995.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said:

    @bb36e said:

    ve never played around with a Mac long enough to confirm, but they seem to have their display scaling down pat - @cartman82 can you confirm?

    They do a better job, but they also "cheat": they only do 2x scaling exactly.

    Apple also had the ability to write their entire graphical layer from basically scratch in 2001, after which the lesson: "hey you should try to use vector graphics for everything, and maybe also never assume any particular DPI" was firmly ingrained in the developers. Microsoft has never had the opportunity to make a clean break like that, not since 1995.

    Wow. 😍 You must be feeling especially good today, this comment was almost cheerful coming from you...
    Whatever you're feeling like right now, keep it going!



  • @dcon said:

    It's even worse when you're second monitor is not scaled. I'm looking at you Adobe!)

    Adobe probably isn't doing anything worse than Windows already does.

    If you have one scaled and one non-scaled monitor, Windows:

    1. Refuses to "correct" the mouse position when moving between the two monitors. (Meaning: your mouse will sometimes hit a "wall" which is obvious if you make a map of the monitor pixels, but isn't visible on-screen in any way.) EDIT: the mouse does correct for DPI when tracking, though, so at least its velocity doesn't change between monitors.
    2. Refuses to draw desktop contents differently on different monitors. So either you have one monitor with FUCKING HUGE icons, or one monitor with extremely miniscule micro-icons. There's no way to simultaneously have normal-sized icons on both monitors.
    3. Made a lot of promises to improve this functionality between Windows 8 and Windows 10; AFAICT they did jack-shit. Windows 10 is exactly as broken as Windows 8 was.

    Those two issues alone (and there were others) is why my 4k monitor is just a really really expensive 1080p monitor at the moment. The only reasonable way to have a 4k multi-monitor experience is to buy two of them, and two video cards beefy enough to run them. (Or SLI the cards. Either way.) I ain't gonna spend all that dough.

    EDIT: that said, on a machine with a single monitor, like my 13.3" 1080p laptop, the 150% scaling option works great. Even with apps you'd expect to be shitty, like Steam. It does seem to even-further-confuse the already-confused NodeBB, though, which apparently was never tested with any zoom percentage other than 100%.

    BTW Skyrim has an amusing bug where it "hid" an on-screen text message (I can't remember which) "offscreen" towards the lower right. So every time you're playing Skyrim there's a bit of text just hovering about 900 pixels below and to the right of your 1080p monitor. The problem is: now you want to run Skyrim in 4k, and that text just hovers over your game. Forever. Totally busted. (You can work-around the issue by going into the localization file and setting the string for that text to just a single space. But you shouldn't have to.)

    Game developers are the fucking laziest developers around, I swear.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Onyx You can right click the Start button, assuming you're not using anything like Classic Shell. That gives you a menu of some handy programs, including the Control Panel.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said:

    Refuses to draw desktop contents differently on different monitors. So either you have one monitor with FUCKING HUGE icons, or one monitor with extremely miniscule micro-icons. There's no way to simultaneously have normal-sized icons on both monitors.

    I was wondering what was going on. I think they "try" to "fix" it in Windows 10, when dragging a DPI-aware application between two monitors it visibly messed the application up when crossing between the two. I'll bookmark myself to remind me to screenshot it if I ever get to see it do it again.


  • BINNED

    @Erufael I was wondering about the stock install. Again, it's not a problem for me to type a bit, and I use Windows rarely as it is, it just seems like a weird omission.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Onyx Yeah, you can right click the start menu button then. You get this: http://prntscr.com/aji1js



  • @Tsaukpaetra said:

    I think they "try" to "fix" it in Windows 10, when dragging a DPI-aware application between two monitors it visibly messed the application up when crossing between the two.

    Pretty sure 8 did that too. If the app identifies on dpiAware=true, the app is auto-scaled back down (so it's fuzzy). There is a point during drag were it snaps between - it's when you've dragged about 2/3 of the app in. If the app is dpiAware=true/pm, windows doesn't do squat. The app said it knows. The problem with true/pm apps is that it appears many (including MS) don't bother recreating the menus/chrome. So that 250% app moved onto a 100% monitor looks like shit because the menus are now huge.

    blakey: I hadn't noticed (2) because all my icons are on the 250% monitor - yeah, that's shit (just checked).



  • @blakeyrat I take it you don't actually disconnect one of the monitors? Because that's where the real fun starts! Having a laptop I obviously do that a lot. I have two external 1080p monitors connected via HDMI and Mini-DisplayPort. Half the time I connect them if the laptop is already running bad things happen.

    Usually the primary monitor randomly migrates between the three displays. It happens so often I don't even care anymore. Other times things start getting scaled on the 1080p displays for no reason (they should be running at 100% DPI). It depends how serious it is, sometimes it's just some stupidly large tray icons. Other times the context menus are massive. Recently the picture was all fuzzy as if it was scaled down to 50% and then scaled back up again. Massive pain in the ass for zero benefit.



  • @Deadfast I actually did try that a bit. My monitors all correctly report their serial numbers (or whatever) to Windows, so it had no problem setting them to how they'd been set before.

    I'd be inclined to blame that situation more on the monitors than on the OS. If the monitor doesn't identify itself, there's not a lot Windows can do except make guesses.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said:

    there's not a lot Windows can do except make guesses.

    @windows_7_microsoft_ said:

    Hmm. Generic PNP Monitor was plugged in again. Was it Generic PNP Monitor or Generic PNP Monitor I was supposed to use for this?
    Well, I know at least it was plugged into Standard VGA Graphics, so it must be Generic PNP Monitor!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Deadfast I actually did try that a bit. My monitors all correctly report their serial numbers (or whatever) to Windows, so it had no problem setting them to how they'd been set before.

    I'd be inclined to blame that situation more on the monitors than on the OS. If the monitor doesn't identify itself, there's not a lot Windows can do except make guesses.

    The monitors do identify themselves. The correct primary monitor is even set in the settings, except in reality it is elsewhere. To fix it I have to change the settings so that the actual primary monitor is set primary and then change it back to the monitor that should have been primary in the first place.

    The problem is clearly hot-plugging them in. If I plug them in while the laptop is turned off and only then do I turn it on all is roses.



  • @Deadfast I still think that's more likely to be a hardware or driver issue than a Microsoft bug, honestly.



  • @blakeyrat Of course you do. Must be my Linux hardware 🚎 .


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat yeah, that's classic laptop display driver idiocy.


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