topic Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do? in Modeling

Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Richard Morrison — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 15:36:22 GMT

This appears to be an issue in all versions of AC that can run on a 4K monitor, including AC20.

I have a new 4K monitor, but the screen for AC is sharp only in native resolution, and then everything is too tiny to use. If I scale the display in Windows 10 up to 150% or 175%, it is large enough, but then the sharpness of icons and text is lost. This is not a problem for other programs. Is there any fix for this?

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

matjashka — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 17:05:44 GMT

Richard,

Unfortunately, the only way to scale up pixels without losing sharpness is going by full increments like 2x, not 1.5x or 1.75x.
200% will use 2x2=4 monitor "dots" to display one pixel without blur, unless the graphic interface is resolution independent (I don't know if the new interface in v20 is or not). Even then you will experience problems with icons that are not correctly hinted (look up "font hinting" for reference)

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Richard Morrison — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 18:52:36 GMT

matjashka wrote:
Richard,

Unfortunately, the only way to scale up pixels without losing sharpness is going by full increments like 2x, not 1.5x or 1.75x.
200% will use 2x2=4 monitor "dots" to display one pixel without blur, unless the graphic interface is resolution independent (I don't know if the new interface in v20 is or not). Even then you will experience problems with icons that are not correctly hinted (look up "font hinting" for reference)

Thanks, Matt. I'll give 200% a try, but I am disappointed that I wasted about $300 for a resolution that has no benefits in AC.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 21:55:28 GMT

Richard wrote:
I'll give 200% a try, but I am disappointed that I wasted about $300 for a resolution that has no benefits in AC.

Don't be. Just keep this thread alive until someone from GS answers it.

AC, as any other expensive professional application, should work with any current hardware. If it does not — you just need to make a clear point to GS to address it.

AC20 is specifically marketed for as "Retina Displays Fully Supported on Mac".
I can see from your signature that you are on Windows, but HDPI monitors are common to both platforms, so lets see what GS has to say.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Richard Morrison — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 22:19:55 GMT

Until GS responds, I may give this a try: http://lifehacker.com/fix-blurry-fonts-in-windows-10-with-this-utility-1734246822

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 22:48:39 GMT

Richard,
I think this is due to how MacOS and windows take two very differing strategies to dealing with HiDPI, on MacOS icons and interface elements are a vector graphic hence they scale to any size but on windows graphics are bitmapped therefore the developers need to create suites of icons for each resolution.
If you think ARCHICAD handles HiDPI not well you should see how poorly AutoCAD handles it, I'm finding AutoCAD almost unusable on my new laptop as I cannot read half of the dialog boxes (either text too small - even with magnifying glass, or too large to fit within dialog box.

Scott

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

matjashka — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 22:54:28 GMT

Richard,

This video: http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/videos/archicad/archicad-20-new-features/archicad_20_interface_and_icon_changes/ clearly states that v20 has vector-based interface icons, which are scalable to support both old and 4K monitors. Looks like your investment will pay off as soon as you upgrade to v20.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

LiHigh — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 15:09:56 GMT

matjashka wrote:
Richard,

This video: http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/videos/archicad/archicad-20-new-features/archicad_20_interface_and_icon_changes/ clearly states that v20 has vector-based interface icons, which are scalable to support both old and 4K monitors. Looks like your investment will pay off as soon as you upgrade to v20.

No. AC 20 is not compatible with Windows 10 dpi scaling!

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

matjashka — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 16:23:39 GMT

I'm sure that sooner or later somebody will elaborate a bit more on this topic. For now, live v20 hasn't yet been spotted in my neck of the woods.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Richard Morrison — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 18:25:41 GMT

As a followup, I tried the font utility (which renders fonts the way that Win8.1 did.) It was better but still not great. I was hoping to achieve something like a Retina display in Windows, but apparently, that's just not going to happen. I'm taking the 4K monitor back (and hope they give me a refund), and bought a 1920x1080 27" standard LED as a second monitor. Running in its native resolution, the monitor displays fonts and icons very crisply, but still not a Retina display.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

stefan — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 13:32:56 GMT

I don't know why everybody assumes icons to be vectorial...

Most Mac software which is retina-compatible has regular and double-size icons, but they are image-based (pixels). ARCHICAD 20 icons are TIFF files and the ARCHICAD installation folder contains a few thousands TIFF files (not SVG or PDF).

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Richard Morrison — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:28:25 GMT

stefan wrote:
I don't know why everybody assumes icons to be vectorial...

Most Mac software which is retina-compatible has regular and double-size icons, but they are image-based (pixels). ARCHICAD 20 icons are TIFF files and the ARCHICAD installation folder contains a few thousands TIFF files (not SVG or PDF).

Not sure why you are assuming that everyone has made that assumption. The referenced video, however, states that AC20 is going to have SVG for the icons. This would help with the icons, but not with the Win10 blurry font issue.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

stefan — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 13:28:45 GMT

Windows in general is "known" for not handling Retina/HiDpi too well consistently. Having worked for almost 4 years on a retina Mac, Apple has some maturity on this level.

I don't think ARCHICAD is doing bad, though. The trouble I have with getting Revit in a usable high-resolution state are frustrating, to say the least. The best result is using low-DPI full HD (1920x1200) and having everything look a bit blurry.

The scaling is on different levels: choosing native screen-resolution is the first step (if the graphics can follow along, that is... which is a bit limited in my Macbook Pro with GT650M card).

Then you need to define the scaling in Windows, which can be 150% or 200% (ideally - avoid 125 or 175%). Then be prepared to log out and back on, to see if Windows applies it correctly.

And even then, not all applications work well. E.g. Rhino and Revit don't work well with the same DPI settings, so you have to keep tweaking.

With ARCHICAD and the newer icons, this should be much better.

(And as for the SVG icons... They may be there somewhere, but diving into the program package reveals only TIFF files for me).

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Katalin Borszeki — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:54:34 GMT

Hi All,

The HDPI display handling of ARCHICAD 20 and previous versions are different on MAC and WIN. The Windows and Macintosh operating systems support HDPI displays on different ways.
On windows ARCHICAD uses the Win 32 API which gives only a basic HDPI development support, so development needs to occur to use HDPI. (On MAC this was a smaller effort.)

(Background info: Every application either does or does not specify how it runs on an HDPI display. The ones which do not specify DPI support are the 'Non DPI aware' applications. Without scaling, the HDPI display shows the windows of these applications extremely small because the pixel size is significantly smaller than on a normal display. To keep readability Windows scales up the UI of these applications: the window content is rendered by the application on a normal way and then Windows scales up the window image with a bitmap stretch. The scaling factor is dependent on the system settings. This scaling causes some blurriness, that is why the UI of ARCHICAD 20 looks blurry this way.)

The solution to this problem is that the scaling should be performed by the application itself and not by Windows. ARCHICAD needs to create bigger dialogs with bigger fonts and dialog elements.
This is an important priority for GRAPHISOFT and development has been initiated to support HDPI displays. It is planned for an upcoming version of ARCHICAD.

If you would like some more information, please read this article about how Win 32 works with HDPI displays:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn469266%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

To avoid blurriness, the scaling can be disabled in the application property dialog, but this causes everything to be very small.

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

shtarkel — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 11:03:57 GMT

So from what I saw like advertising for ARCHICAD 20 I assumed that the icons will be vectorial and ARCHICAD 20 supports HDPI 4k monitors?
Now I see That was just a gimmick PR?!

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 15:26:30 GMT

I'm very disappointed too, after advertisement I thought that AC20 would support high dpi screen on windows(

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:47:12 GMT

I find this issue a big disappointment. With all my previous versions of AC I used Win 7 OS but when I went to AC20 I also upgraded to Win 10. I was also contemplating a new monitor as my 27" (1900 x 1200) crapped out and now I stuck with a 22" monitor (1380 x 780). I wanted to get a new 4k (cinema res. - slightly bigger than UHD) at 34" but until GS solves the issue I am not sure I want to spend the money. Katalin Borszeki from GS stated that the necessary changes will be available in a future release of AC but I am wondering if it will be in the form of a HOTFIX or AC21 which won't be out until next summer or so. I wonder if anyone at GS can provide a more accurate time frame of when the fix should be available.
Mike

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 21:04:59 GMT

DrWho wrote:
I find this issue a big disappointment. ....
Mike

I find it disappointing that Dr Who's real name is "Mike"

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Eduardo Rolon — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 22:37:55 GMT

s2art wrote:
DrWho wrote:
I find this issue a big disappointment. ....
Mike
I find it disappointing that Dr Who's real name is "Mike"

Spoilers!!!

Re: Poor DPI scaling on 4K monitor. What to do?

Rakela Raul — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 02:09:54 GMT

I find it disappointing that Dr Who's real name is "Mike"

i agree big !!!