Slashdot Mirror
Windows 8 Has Scaling Issues On High-PPI Displays
crookedvulture writes "High-PPI displays are becoming increasingly popular on tablets and notebooks, but Windows 8 may not be ready for them. On a 13" notebook display with a 1080p resolution, the RTM version of Win8 scales up some desktop UI elements nicely. However, there are serious issues with Metro, which produces tiles and text that are either too small or too large depending on the PPI setting used. That setting, by the way, is a simple on/off switch that tells the OS to 'make everything bigger.' Web browsing is particularly problematic, with Internet Explorer 10 introducing ugly rendering artifacts when scaling pages in both Metro and desktop modes. Clearly, there's work to be done on the OS side to properly support higher pixel densities."
1080p is just 1920x1080 - that part almost certainly works fine. It's that pixel density has, for years, been within a fairly narrow range (22-27 inch displays all maxing out at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080). The problem is pixel density is now increasing, think apple retina displays, and that's a problem most of us on the software side were never expecting and aren't used to having to cope with. At least not for desktops/laptops (phones is another matter because they are a rapidly maturing product used in a completely different way).
Besides that, different groups will have people who are more or less aware of this problem and trying to deal with it. Microsoft *should* have testing labs for all of these different things, and feedback about a very uneven experience should have moved up and down the chain. But as someone who writes games for a living, most of the stuff I have done in the last 5 or 6 years would look like shit on a 13 inch display at 1920x1080. Everything would be too small unless the screen is 10cm from your face. That's the catch here, we've designed for a single pixel to take up a certain fraction of your personal field of view, suddenly higher density displays come along, to which we initially ask, why, was there something wrong with the old pixel densities? Is this technology actually better or is it just going to be a method to sell expensive video cards. These new displays people are physically positioning the way their old setups were, but well, all of the assumptions about field of view get tossed.