Support for High DPI Display Scaling on Windows

Since it is again not in version 17, I try it again

There are so many topics in this forum about this problem and not a single hint from BM. A few examples:

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=83845

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=50161&p=687041

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=91755&p=624039

For me personally this is absolutely the biggest feature request. The missing UI scaling destroys the whole experience with Resolve, no matter how good the software is otherwise.

I second that feeling, really a shame that Resolve on Windows can't be made to look and feel like on the Mac

Yes! I wish this were a high priority. I literally have my wallet open right now but I downloaded the 17 free beta to see if this is addressed and it is not. So I close my wallet. On Windows, this makes it unusable for me. It needs to support monitors of all resolutions and a mixture of High and non High DPI monitors (like adobe stuff). Even the last Nuke update finally showed that Foundry got it right. How 17.2 please! I work on both Mac and PC and having the same experience on the PC is a must.

What I do personally, in the meantime, is to use 2 different app shortcuts. One with the "Program DPI and High DPI scaling override" option activated, and one without for the Davinci Resolve program shortcuts.

I have the "Custom scaling" option at 135 on my Windows 10 (27" 4k monitor).

When I don't care about the super tiny text of the UI in Resolve, but I still want to use the full real estate of my 4k monitor, I just use the regular program shortcut. Nodes on the Fusion page are tiny, but it doesn't really matter.

But sometimes I don't need that much of space and I just want to be able to navigate more easily in the menus, I just use the other (modified) shortcut. The only downside is the fact that the text of the UI is a bit blurry.

Right click on a program shortcut (just make a copy of the one from Resolve).
Tab "Compatibility"
In "Change high DPI settings" :
- Activate the "override system DPI" and select "When I open this application"
- Activate the "Overrid high DPI scaling behavior. Scaling performed by : and select "System"

It's not perfect but it works well for my 135 scaling.

BTW, it works well for some of the old applications too.

This has been driving me insane also.

I'm working on 27" 4K screens and with default windows scaling (150%) enabled, everything is huge and you have no space to work.

I got around this by altering my shortcut to bypass the scaling for resolve with:
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -WindowStyle Hidden "$Env:QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=1;$Env:QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=2;start 'C:\Program Files\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Resolve.exe'"

Which improves the UI scale, but now all the text and buttons are miniscule...

Can't seem to win on this one. Every other piece of software in existence gets this right.

High DPI is a marketing gimmick that provides no real world benefit, but actually does 'harm' in that you lose screen real estate.

Display Scaling should always be set to 100%.

I would vote no on this.

But if you set windows display scaling to 100% then all your icons and windows UI are tiny.

So system scaling in that sense is a useful function of windows.

The problems arise with how that seems to interact with Resolve.

But if you set windows display scaling to 100% then all your icons and windows UI are tiny.

So system scaling in that sense is a useful function of windows.

The problems arise with how that seems to interact with Resolve.

And it's not only on Windows, it's everywhere, I mean, our phones have high dpi screens, and app are adapting themselves to it. Same with web pages, etc.

Resolve is the only "big" application I regularly use that doesn't scale nicely on windows 10.

I'm on a 27" 4k monitor, and icons and texts are too tiny at 100%. So I put the scaling at 135.

I worked a couple of weeks with the "trick" in the Compatibility > Change high DPI settings thing I wrote about, now I just don't bother. I can't stand the blurry texts. At 135% scaling, Resolve "acts" as if it was at 100 (so everything is so tiny, but who cares). At 150%, Resolve is twice as big, the UI is not blurry but it's totally useless at that size lol.

Now I just don't bother, I just use Resolve with is tiny texts (at least it's not blurry and doesn't look like an abandoned app you reinstall on a modern OS).

95% of all my applications look "nice", with sharp text and "readable" text. Only few (like topaz app) have blurry text because they don't scale properly. I often use photoshop, another "pro" application, and it does it the right way.

I see some people are saying that "High DPI is a marketing gimmick", what? You're telling me that putting more pixels on the same area as no real-world benefits? ahah that's why all the applications on our phone are scaling properly on all types of screen. The same goes for web pages.

Anyway, it needs to be done.

The following works perfectly fine for me on my 43" Screen at 4K. Not super small and not the default when you start the regular program, well balanced It still remains an issue on Resolve 17 Beta 9. I am not sure why they are not fixing this. It has been my absolute biggest issue when I moved from Premiere Pro to Da vinci. (the second issue is the performance of the app in general for 4K videos, clearly not on par with Premiere Pro esp. when editing 4k videos!)

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -WindowStyle Hidden "$Env:QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=1;$Env:QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=true;start 'C:\Program Files\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Resolve.exe'"

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -WindowStyle Hidden "$Env:QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=1;$Env:QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=true;start 'C:\Program Files\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Resolve.exe'"

I have just tried this. It doesn't solve the problem with Resolve, but at least I can now work with the rest of the system at 150%, which is recommended for a 32" UHD monitor. Everything below that just looks tiny to me.

I really hope that Resolve will get this "marketing gimmick" in version 18

+1 to this request.

Still an issue with Resolve 17 (and 18 Beta).

I bought binoculars and decided to put it at 100%, even on my 4k 27".
My went from 135% in the Windows 10 scaling to 125, just for more real estate, it's small, but it still manageable.

With Resolve, even if it's hard to distinguish some of the text, the previews of titles are TINY lol, I prefer that than having blurry edges, or nothing in between the scaling.

I still want Resolve to be like every single piece of app out there on windows/Android/Mac/iOS, and scale itself properly depending of the settings in Windows.

(that's why I've made a feature request to be able to zoom them like in the media pool too, so even if we are at 100% scaling, we can still manage to "see" stuff)

After I've seen Corridor Crew praise Resolve in one of their recent potcasts I though I give it a shot as I can feel their pain with AE and Pr.

That said, I simply can't even evaluate Resolve because of the UI Scaling (or lack there off) - which boggles my mind.

I use an LG 38GL950G-B (3840px x 1600px) and have DPI scaling set to 150% in Windows 10.

Resolve outright ignores the 150% set in WIndows which leads to a silly small font inside the UI of Resolve. I can't read most of the Text from a normal viewing distance which is especially problematic when you are learning a new software.

If I follow one of the various suggestions on the forums to increase the UI scale then I either

• get 150% UI scaling but with very blurry text and the Clean Feed misplaced/cut off on the 2nd monitor
• or a 200% UI which is just equally unuseable as 100%

This UI issue is an instant K.O. for Resolve and I can't comprehend how this is still not fixed in v18 as many users have this problem.

Until BMD fixes the UI scaling shortcommings I simply can't even consider to switch to it as Resolve is unusable in this state. And I guess I am not alone.

Would be nice if BMD could at least tell us if they intend to fix this or not.....
If not then I don't need to keep an eye on Resolve anymore.

Blackmagic don't seem to comment on the High DPI issue, so I guess they accept for those users it's a poor experience. You can bet your bottom dollar if this was happening on M1 they'd fix it in less than the near decade Windows has had High DPI now!

Yeah, it's annoying that there isn't parity on this front. No issues with High DPI for macOS.

You see this high dpi non-compatibility / partial compatibility on a lot of the old-school Apple-centric developers software out there. Avid ProTools is almost unusable out of the box on high dpi Windows it has so many scaling issues, even parts of the menus are missing in Windows haha!

Best in the business is Bitwig imo. It simply doesn't care what high dpi scaling you're using, its GUI is identically scaled whatever DPI you want to use is fine. It even has its own internal 100 to 200% scaling to, so you can even overide the Windows High DPI for itself only and use its internal scaling if you want! Absolutely what very developer should be aiming to do imo.

bw-100-200x25.jpg (783.33 KiB) Viewed 4868 times

The same issue exists with plugins on Windows 4k. Some display beautifully. Others, especially Izotope, are totally illegible and therefore useless.

It even has its own internal 100 to 200% scaling to, so you can even overide the Windows High DPI for itself only and use its internal scaling if you want! Absolutely what very developer should be aiming to do imo.

This would be fantastic!

Yep, I don't know some of the VST plugin developers get it so wrong. Luckily it's a minority and if they store their height and width in registry you can sometimes sort it.

Bumping this thread since v18 is properly out and this is still a problem.

At this point doesn't seem like it's ever going to happen

I updated to version 18, and this is still an issue. Absolutely insane that there is still no response about such a widespread issue. Extremely frustrating.
It doesn't only affect the UI, but also the video clean feed.

Is there a good reason why this hasn't been addressed after all these years?
This is the only modern software I'm aware of that has this kind of issue still in 2022.

BMD doesn't respond to any issues as far as I can tell. I believe it's part of their decision to not comment on future development.

I wish they'd find a middle ground on this but for now, they might be working on this and about to release a fix but we wouldn't know until the next version came out.


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they might be working on this and about to release a fix but we wouldn't know until the next version came out.

Yeah, that's mostly true, but not always... heres an example :
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=96350&start=50#p719536

Yes. It would be so helpful if there were some sort of regular marking of issues raised here as "in progress." Not likely but would be great.


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BMD doesn't respond to any issues as far as I can tell. I believe it's part of their decision to not comment on future development.

I wish they'd find a middle ground on this but for now, they might be working on this and about to release a fix but we wouldn't know until the next version came out.


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They do comment on some issues that get raised, but for some reason seem dead silent about this one despite it coming up regularly.

I've been waiting 5 versions for a fix... I don't have much hope at the moment. I suspect it's something to do with how the program is coded (just speculation). Perhaps it would require a complete rewriting for the code. Still, this problem is not going to go away. I will be overjoyed if it does one day get fixed.

It's like waiting for a bus. Experiments show that it's something like twice as "painful" to wait when you have no idea if it's coming than if you know it's close. More people use the bus when there's that little display that says how long until it arrives.


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Honestly, I think the sheer volume of user requests that come at them so thick and fast here may be a little overwhelming... given they'll already have their own roadmap taking up dev resources, addressing and keeping on top of all our piecemeal user requests, some of them not at all insignificant, would probably require hiring a whole separate team!

The squeaky wheel gets the oil tho, including the wheels on the bus.

I agree it's probably too much work. Another reason I wish there were an actual user-visible bug system rather than just a forum. That way we could know without additional effort from them what reports were being worked on and even see when they're fixed as opposed to just happening into discovering something we long avoided is now working.


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I find the inconsistency between Mac and Windows very frustrating. I work at a facility that is mostly macOS and the fact that there is no issues across any of the High DPI Macbook Pros or iMac Pros just makes it more annoying that it then doesn't work on Windows.

Fingers crossed that the Windows and Linux fractional scaling support, recently added to Fusion Studio (18) will also make its way into Resolve. And yes, I realise this isn't 'news' but it's a nice reminder nonetheless. :)

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=164928

Fingers crossed that the Windows and Linux fractional scaling support, recently added to Fusion Studio (18) will also make its way into Resolve. And yes, I realise this isn't 'news' but it's a nice reminder nonetheless.

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=164928

Does that mean that Fusion 18 has proper scaling in windows?? If so, there may be hope for resolve too!

Installed Fusion 18 to see how the scaling functioned. It worked like a dream, not sure why it's not in Resolve 18 too.

I run my 32" 4K monitor at 2560x1440 for this reason, seems to yield the best result from all the workarounds (and I have tried them ALL). This is the ideal res for a 32" monitor for Resolve GUI, should you be looking to buy. Upshot is it presents much the same DPI as my 24" 1600x1200 second GUI monitor which sits next to it, so the real estate plays nicely together.

Just downloaded and am trying DR for first time. Watched a few tutorials on Youtube, but now realize I am straining to see the screen....after a bunch of searching I have ended up here...

+1

18.1 adds support for this!

I’ve been waiting for this fix a long time now. There has been 4 major versions of Resolve since I first encountered this issue. I hope they fix it now and release it in 18.1 too. Make this a priority please.

I’ve been waiting for this fix a long time now. There has been 4 major versions of Resolve since I first encountered this issue. I hope they fix it now and release it in 18.1 too. Make this a priority please.

18.1 has added support for this!

I’ve been waiting for this fix a long time now. There has been 4 major versions of Resolve since I first encountered this issue. I hope they fix it now and release it in 18.1 too. Make this a priority please.

18.1 has added support for this!

Oh really. Thanks. I’ll check it out tonight.

YES! Thank you so much! This will make my life easier
It looks great, but I wonder if the UI scaling in Resolve can be set manually or if it just takes over the Windows system scaling? I didn't find anything in the preferences.

unbelievable!

Does anyone knows how to get Resolve not taking Windows' scaling into consideration?
It's a bit too big for me now. I lost a big chuck of space, I'm on a 125% (on a 27" screen) scaling on Windows, the desktop (and all the other app) are not too small, not too big, but Resolve 18.1 is bigger than the rest.

The 100% scaling wasn't perfect, tiny text and UI elements, but I got used to all that space for the videos, and all the real estate on the node graph in fusion.

PS.
It's refreshing to be able to navigate in the UI better at the actual size I have to admit... especially for the effects previews on the effect panel. I guess I'll get use to it if I can't change it back.

I'm curious if an option for manually select the scaling % independently of the host would be a good idea? With 5-10% increments. I don't know just throwing an idea out there

Just downloaded and am trying DR for first time. Watched a few tutorials on Youtube, but now realize I am straining to see the screen....after a bunch of searching I have ended up here...

+1

I asked on Monday as a new user and they added it just for me!

Finally fixed!!

Please can you put back the log controls keyboard shortcut, which has been removed

Yes and no lol