I guess there still is no point in ordering a 4K display.
Still blurry in 10.1 Berlin.
Seriously, EMBT?
https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-9678
I guess there still is no point in ordering a 4K display.
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32 thoughts on “I guess there still is no point in ordering a 4K display.”
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Well to be fair Microsoft still hasn’t proper high-dpi coverage in Win10, so yeah…
Yet, nearly all my MS apps are crystal clear, regardless of DPI and scaling.
Lars Fosdal Well, on the flip side, text rendering in Outlook now looks like shit when you’re running regular non-high-dpi.
Same in Word and Excel of course, they use the same base after all.
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Blurry? I’m struggling to imagine how you get from badly handled DPI to blurry. At least in the context of a 4K screen, it makes no sense.
It was claimed that “The IDE has become DPI-aware” in What’s New. But… Seriously?
Baoquan Zuo Well, perhaps the IDE now goes “yeah ok, so you switched to high-DPI, does it look like I care?” 😛
Bill Meyer https://quality.embarcadero.com/secure/attachment/11536/2014-11-05%2012_55_26-Greenshot.png
You can see the IDE in the background, and our VCL app in the foreground – and the VS IDE to the left. Notice the difference in crispness and clarity. The IDE and the VCL app is blurry.
Edit: and this 3K image isn’t even as bad as full 4K – where the difference in clarity is even more distinct.
After I installed 10.1 it was crystal clear.
But I changed to blurry because form designed was not scaled. And I don’t like to use magnifying glasses to edit forms.
Cristian Peța The form designer is indeed a big problem (vcl controls/third-party controls/frames…)
Lars Fosdal Certainly not why I would pay the price for a 4K screen. 🙁
I use a macbookpro retina as dev machine , i must admit that it has impacted my developments since a year and a half in a very negative way. Blurry text = unusable. It is not meant as a criticism but as an observation.
I’d say its the font. Try Segoe UI Size 9 on your forms, then your app is also blurry. Makes me headache. I switched to segoe since 10S and it was ok on 3k.
But i’ve no idea if you can change the font for the IDE.
A 1280×1024 pixel monitor helps a lot!
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/spaghettidba/2015/10/14/ssms-in-high-dpi-displays-how-to-stop-the-madness/
You need a 4K display before you clients users get it. Especially if you deliver VCL (Win32) applications (imho). I have told admins for 0.5K users windows 10 is ok, but refrain from 4k displays for another year 🙂 [Or pay me by the hour to workaround].
And Win10 itself has some stuff that does do it at all. The desktop (!) needs an login-logout after scale change. Any user setting a scale non-dividable by 100 (ah, nomenclature, i mean multiples of 100) will see crappy stuff in a lot of applications. Chrome is one widely used.
As I am visual impaired I cannot appreciate the benefits of a 4k display. Currently I’m running at 1680 x 1050 and feels like fonts are too small. Maybe that 4K display are not best suited for developing, but instead more useful for image editing?
Fabio VITALE What about your cellphone/tablet? Do you even notice that it scales to a very high resolution? You feel the fonts are too small on 1680×1050. Now imagine how would your fonts look like in the size of 0.2″ on 1680×1050 and on 4K. Which one would you look at the whole day?
Lars Fosdal Is that something you would run and test? http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer dot com , or did you find something?
I still don’t see the point of 4K if scaling is used. Why buy lots of pixel real estate and put it to waste by scaling it? If you can’t see stuff at 100% then you don’t need it. That’s just my sad opinion though. I know display manufacturers will say differently.
Lars Fosdal You mention that your VCL app is blurry. I want to show everyone that it is possible to make a crisp non-blurry VCL app.
Here is a picture of a VCL app that shows the two “Enable High-DPI” settings side by side.
You can see the one on the left is the “normal” blurry version. The one on the right is has “Enable High-DPI” checked.
http://imgur.com/zrD51O2
Make sure you download and open it up to full size.
Retina screen Windows 10 with 200% scaling.
200% is not a problem, 125%, 150%, 175% is.
I.e. when the system needs to do pixel rounding. I’m not sure what the difference is between the VCL which appears blurry and the other apps that don’t.
What scaling do you use? The bitmap scaling mentioned in the link I posted or the default one in Windows?
Douglas Rudd you should write a blog post (;
I’m suffering the same problem on a 1080p 32″ monitor, the text editor is blurry 🙁
Lars Fosdal”200% is not a problem, 125%, 150%, 175% is. I.e. when the system needs to do pixel rounding. ”
I haven’t tried at those percent yet because this is what my monitor is set for. I will do it sometime.
But I don’t think it has anything to do with “pixel rounding”. In Windows High-DPI text is drawn the normal way, namely, with vector drawing of TrueType fonts. There are no pixels involved. So it shouldn’t matter what the percentage is. The only time pixels are involved is when the app is NOT DPI aware.
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For one thing, DPI and 125%, 150% scaling are two different things. I have a monitor that has 192 DPI. That means 200% scaling is “normal”, just like 100% scaling is normal for a 96 DPI monitor. The apps come out the same size on the screen. On my monitor, setting it to 125% would make things microscopic.
If you change the scaling in Windows settings because you are blind and want things bigger, that’s a different story. No matter what you set your Windows scaling to, 150% or 300%, the DPI is always the same. As far as I know, there is no Windows function to get the users screen scaling value.
Also, I don’t know whats going on with the Delphi IDE because it looks like it’s not DPI aware at all.
I don’t know why Delphi/VCL goes blurry, but it does. Perhaps it is related to the VCL double buffering?
Douglas Rudd I second Jeroen’s suggestion – I’d be interested to read about the high DPI support you implemented.