Scaling on high resolution screens has been a bit of a nag on vanilla Windows 8 since release, and users of the operating system had already raised the issue to Microsoft Surface team a few months back.
The software titan acknowledged this and promised better DPI scaling in Windows 8.1.
And even though the de facto display resolution on most 15 and 16 inch laptops is the downright abysmal 1366 by 768 pixels, the dawn of higher resolution, even 4K displays is said to be upon us. Tablets, notebooks, desktop PC vendors are all slowly moving towards high resolution displays.
For this reason, more attention is being afforded to the way text and applications scale with these high DPI (dots per inch) displays.
Microsoft, in a new blog post, detailed the improvements made to Windows 8.1 in this regard, claiming that the upcoming version of Windows packs several DPI scaling improvements that allow the OS to optimize the readability (as well as the usability) of these high DPI displays.
“Windows 8.1 provides APIs for apps to know what the optimal scaling value is. If you were developing that photo editing app, you could scale the toolbars and chrome based on the optimal scaling value and leave the image viewing area at 100% scale.”
The idea, according to the company, is to provide a uniform experience across multi-display systems, as these are quickly becoming popular across the world.
Additionally, Windows 8.1 includes new enhancements that enable custom DPI scaling for Metro apps, allowing developers the ability to easily create software that works perfectly on both small and high-resolution displays.
