PUBLIC MARKS from srcmax with tags "display scaling" & windows

They generally look great on a high DPI device, but when used on secondary displays at different scale factors (including docking and projection), they may be somewhat blurry due to bitmap scaling. A number of popular desktop applications (Notepad++, Chrome, Firefox) have similar blurriness issues in these scenarios. We have ongoing work on improving migration tools for developers with these complex Win32 desktop applications.

However, I just upgraded my work laptop to a Dell XPS 15 9550 which has 4K UHD resolution. When I hooked it up to the 1920x1080 monitor, everything looked okay at first, but then i noticed a few things: Some content looked blurry. Strangely enough, the images seem to look okay, but text (ex: website text) looks pretty pixelated. I assume this is a scaling thing where the window is scaled down in resolution to fit on the secondary monitor and then perhaps back up? Some programs (ex: Photoshop) are great on my laptop screen, but when I drag it over to the monitor, it is extremely blown up and has a very small workspace. I haven't messed with the preferences, but I assume if I shrink down the UI, it will be super small on my laptop.

Steve Wright’s previous blog post about display scaling for high dots-per-inch (DPI) displays in Windows 10 does a great job of giving an overview of the concepts of how Windows handles DPI scaling. In this article I’m going to focus more on the technical side of what we’ve been working on for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update to help improve the display-scaling story for desktop applications. Note that most of what this article discusses does not apply to Universal Windows Applications (UWA) as they already handle display scaling well.