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by vehemenz 1630 days ago
What? MacOS does scale. MacOS was doing this correctly years before Windows!

First of all, DPI is not the metric we're interested in. That is a unit for print quality, and it has no relevance for an OS, for Photoshop, or anything we do on a screen. The operating system does not know how big your screen is. Inches nor dots are relevant; only pixels are. It would be more accurate to talk about the ratio of monitor pixels to apparent pixels. I guess Microsoft finally got the memo in Windows 11 (or was it 10?) and changed to percentages.

In MacOS, a 4K monitor set to 1920x1080 will still be 3840x2160, but it displays 4 pixels for every 1 apparent pixel. Everything scales correctly, except for legacy applications. The UI elements, text, etc. appear to be a sharper version of 1080p. In Windows land, this is the same thing as "200%." As far as I can tell, Windows does the same thing but uses scaling percentages instead of apparent resolution.
2 comments
lostmsu 1630 days ago
Your only problem with Windows appears to be that it named the scaling setting "DPI" until Windows 7 or so to handle scaling. But as the parent mentioned, Windows is definitely superior to MacOS, as it provides arbitrary scaling ratios, and renders text perfectly at any ratio.

To go deeper into nitpicking, DPI is not even that misleading, if you take "inch" in DPI to be equal to 72 points as used in font sizes. Then a 72pt font on the screen with DPI X will be rendered with height of X pixels.

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int_19h 1630 days ago
DPI is a valid metric for anything that the human eye sees. There's no difference in that regard between text printed on paper, and text displayed on the screen. The smaller the dots, the better it looks.

And yes, the OS does in fact know how big your screen is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...

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