Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

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rtcardinal
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Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by rtcardinal » Wed May 27, 2015 8:59 pm

This is kind of frustrating, as a lot of the newer PC workstation laptops with nice form factors are coming stock with 3k and up displays. 1080 is on very much on the way out. Too soon, I think. Maybe a quarter of my plugins have HiDPI support so far... but anyway.

I use both OS X and Windows, I'm largely platform agnostic.
After struggling with the performance of a 13 inch retina i5 for the last while in Yosemite (having all sorts of CPU throttling issues that I didn't have in mavericks, as well as the Iris graphics causing CPU spikes, and overall stability issues), I moved back over to win8.1 in bootcamp for my live rig and have been enjoying more control over my CPU throttling (setting min processor usage to 100% when plugged in), snappier graphics (displays on plugins and knobs are more responsive), and waaaaaay better stability for my setups, and with just a bit more power on the same hardware overall, I've been mostly happy ;-)

BUT, my living and work situation is forcing me to be a lot more mobile, so I've since sold the 13 inch, and am looking to upgrade to either a new PC lappy or a MBP 15inch retina with discrete graphics, and just run win on there (hey, I like the form factor, and having both OSs without much hassle).

So yeah... Still having no official support for HiDPI in windows is really putting me at a stalemate, and I'd like to have a functional system soon. I understand I can change the scaling in Live for this, and it still looks mostly crisp, but the menus and plugin windows get supppper small. Non-HiDPI blurriness just kills my eyes after an hour. Ugh... I'd really like to avoid setting everything up in Yosemite temporarily, and then have to re-do everything again in windows whenever the Abes decide to put proper support in.

Anyone else feeling this first world burn? And are there any work around as the moment?

rtcardinal
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by rtcardinal » Wed May 27, 2015 9:04 pm

Personally, I feel this high resolution support could be hugely derailing for a lot of small to mid sized devs, which is why I think it's too soon to completely abandon 1080p. It's been hard enough over the last few years with 64bit transitions, new plugin formats (Thanks Avid), and general OS maintenance stuff. I can't imagine full GUI re-writes being something that all devs are prepared for right now.
It's nice to see things getting crisp, but it feels like we're going to be in a transition period for a long time, and we'll be have half of our stuff crisp, and half of it blurry and blown up. Seems like mostly a 'nice to have' for us audio folk... which can potentially hinder performance (especially on integrated graphics chips that need to use a lot of system memory).
PROGRESS.

mrgrim3
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by mrgrim3 » Wed May 27, 2015 9:11 pm

programming and developing software is pretty hard also and sometimes you can change one thing and it causes errors elsewhere in your code

and to top it off there is most likely more than one person working on it so everyone might not do so well together

i think they will eventually get to it tho look how theyre doing the latencey issue in 9.2 with 3rd party vst and automation finally after a large amount of time

i think part of why all this stuff is taking a while is the push focus when 9 came out delayed them alot in the software part
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rtcardinal
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by rtcardinal » Wed May 27, 2015 9:20 pm

mrgrim3 wrote:programming and developing software is pretty hard also and sometimes you can change one thing and it causes errors elsewhere in your code

and to top it off there is most likely more than one person working on it so everyone might not do so well together

i think they will eventually get to it tho look how theyre doing the latencey issue in 9.2 with 3rd party vst and automation finally after a large amount of time

i think part of why all this stuff is taking a while is the push focus when 9 came out delayed them alot in the software part
Yep, for sure. I work in games and software development, so I'm no stranger to the challenges. It just seems like a big feature to lack parity on between platforms for this long.
And +1(00000000000) to the automation latency compensation. Finally, automation that's actually accurate.

beats me
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by beats me » Wed May 27, 2015 9:52 pm

Marketing. Apple has been blasting us with “retina!” for a long time now which gives off the impression all Mac users are on retina or about to be.

Windows users, not so much. The screen resolution mention is just another bullet point in the gobbledygook spec barrage. Toss in Windows users reputation for being bottom line penny pinchers and it gives off the impression it’s a niche market at the moment. Not much of an incentive to spend the development time.

rtcardinal
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by rtcardinal » Thu May 28, 2015 6:25 am

beats me wrote:Marketing. Apple has been blasting us with “retina!” for a long time now which gives off the impression all Mac users are on retina or about to be.

Windows users, not so much. The screen resolution mention is just another bullet point in the gobbledygook spec barrage. Toss in Windows users reputation for being bottom line penny pinchers and it gives off the impression it’s a niche market at the moment. Not much of an incentive to spend the development time.
Yeah, marketing. Whatever impression is given off, it's still a large demographic.
I just hope it gets fixed soon. Live has always been pretty solid with OS parity (at least, compared to a lot of other DAWs). This is a bit of an weird one, I hope they don't fall behind with that.

pencilrocket
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by pencilrocket » Thu May 28, 2015 7:29 am

quite a few DAW have begun to support 4k. So every software will do eventually... Patience you must have young padawan.

rtcardinal
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by rtcardinal » Thu May 28, 2015 8:00 am

pencilrocket wrote:quite a few DAW have begun to support 4k. So every software will do eventually... Patience you must have young padawan.
Indeed. I'm fine with being patient, as long as I can plan around it. Business, and all that, other young padawan.

granted
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by granted » Fri May 29, 2015 3:35 pm

I like FL Studio's answer to the HiDPI issue: Rewrite the entire interface using vector based graphics. Genius.

rtcardinal
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by rtcardinal » Fri May 29, 2015 5:31 pm

granted wrote:I like FL Studio's answer to the HiDPI issue: Rewrite the entire interface using vector based graphics. Genius.
Definitely. They're killing it on that front. The new mixer is really cool!
The thing with Live is that it's already vector based, and you can get it looking sharp in windows when you run it at native resolution, and then scale the interface up in Live. Problem is that menus and plugins are super small, and there are interface inconsistencies. So this is basically just a scaling and QA issue, and it doesn't require the same kind of overhaul that FL did.

salmonito
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Re: Still no windows HiDPI support months after 'retina' support

Post by salmonito » Sun Nov 22, 2015 7:27 pm

Any developments on this issue for windows?

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