Blurry screen when using 1/2 native resolution

I have a 3200x1800 13" laptop running windows 10. Many legacy apps have terrible DPI scaling and I attempted to avoid this issue by simply setting my resolution to 1600x900. My thought would be that a 1x1 pixel would render as 2x2. Obviously this is not the case.

Objects are still blurry though I would have assumed pixels would have simply doubled and I would have effectively half the PPI.

Can someone explain to me how windows is scaling the images to my display and if there is a way to avoid the pain that is high DPI scaling in windows?

Mr S

Posted 2016-01-15T00:03:04.233

Reputation: 9

Though a bit tedious, you can go to the .exe of your program, right-click and select Properties, under the Compatibility tab, check Disable display scaling on high DPI settings. – boxspah – 2016-01-15T00:08:51.970

Ive tried that with mixed results. Some times font is still scaled incorrectly. – Mr S – 2016-01-15T00:17:58.967

That's exactly what should be expected to happen. You're effectively taking an image and scaling it up to 200%, and that's going to look bad. – Hellreaver – 2016-01-15T05:46:39.530

Answers

I AM NOT AN EXPERT SO I AM NOT SURE WHAT MY SOLUTION WILL BREAK

If I notice negative impact from it I will update this post.

Evidently Windows subpixle rendering does not work this way for a bunch of reasons.

Once learning this I got to thinking if I could trick windows into thinking the native display resolution was smaller than it really was. After some googling I found this regkey for the display. The key after Configuration can change.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Configuration\SHP144A0_1E_07DF_CC^308AEBB00B16BB169DBCDF562C399811\00\00

Several values corresponded to my native x resolution (3200) and several to my y (1800). I replaced them all with 1/2 their values, logged in and logged out and noticed it was fixed!

I have no idea what this will break so please use caution and back up your registry.

Mr S

Posted 2016-01-15T00:03:04.233

Reputation: 9

Ive been running this solution for almost a year now with no issues. – Mr S – 2016-12-21T16:45:52.913