Blur on HighDPI displays

from Stardock Forums

Hi all!

I'm new to skinning with WindowBlinds (just bought it recently). During my first experiments I noticed that it blurs original textures if "size of text and objects" in Display Settings is > 100%

What I did to make it clear:

1) Open "Diamond" theme in SkinStudio => Edit Titlebars and WindowFrames => Borders -> Caption -> Glass. Changed top left corner of original texture to this:

2) Changed resolution to 3840*2160, set text and object size to 100%, took screen shot of the Explorer window on green background:

On 100% it looks good.

3) Changed text and object size to 200% (I use this value all the time, because on 100% everything is too small), took the screen shot again:

On 200% I got it blurred :(

The question is can I somehow avoid this bluring? Although it looks not too bad on the display, it misses this beatiful sharpness of High DPI displays.

windowblinds
4,102 views 1 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top

So I'm going to leave my uninformed comment. Isn't scaling (HiDPI) a lot of marketing bs? Clearly if you are watching a 4K movie you will experience more detail. But with software I doubt it. Maximum sharpness will always be without scaling, running at 100%, HiDPI or not.

Graphics and fonts are made with a certain number of pixels, unless it's vector-based. So a HiDPI display needs to scale OS and applications, in this case 200%. Modern apps are built to scale, so are Android and iOS apps. That's why they look boring, without graphics that doesn't scale well.

Most desktop applications are not built for HiDPI. WB skins are made with a certain number of pixels. You can't create extra pixels out of thin air. I think Apple choose 200% so they could simply make one pixel into four. It doesn't look better, nor worse. I don't use MacOS, but I believe Apple has now made HiDPI skins for most of their applications so they can take advantage of that extra sharpness.

Best scaling experience on Windows is probably default skin and only using Modern apps. :-"