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

[Richard Morrison]

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?

[stefan]

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).

[Richard Morrison]

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.

[stefan]

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).

[Katalin Borszeki]

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.

[shtarkel]

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?!

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

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

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

[Eduardo Rolon]

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!!!

[Rakela Raul]

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

i agree big !!!