Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Mister_Snuggles 1925 days ago
> Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well?

MacOS handles it very well, moving a window from a high-DPI display to a low-DPI display works perfectly.

I'm not sure about how Windows handles mixed-DPI, but it handles DPI changes mostly OK. I only access my Windows machines via RDP, so sometimes they get a high-DPI display and sometimes they get a low-DPI one. Apart from one program (there are per-program settings available in Windows to help fix scaling issues) everything seems to handle it fine.
2 comments
kevincox 1924 days ago
IIUC the macOS approach is functional but not perfect. I believe it renders all apps at a high resolution (higher than the highest attached display), then the compositor downscales them to the display. This means that apps are using more resources to render and are unable to render pixel-perfect.

I believe that on Wayland the apps are told the scaling factors of the monitors that they are on (or the compositor can scale them if they don't want to switch resolution or are across multiple monitors).

AFAIK apps can't work around this very easily (if at all).

link
kitsunesoba 1925 days ago
IME mixed DPI under Windows is a mixed bag, with behavior varying on an app to app basis. For instance Telegram (Qt) can’t deal with being moved from one screen to the other and will look either tiny or huge, but most Win32 and WinUI apps work just fine.

This distinction doesn’t exist on macOS for the most part, even “foreign” UI libraries will appear the correct size when changing screens.

link