[BUG-11024] Second Life unusable on Windows 10 with 4k monitor: SL forcibly overrides DPI compatibility option #1286
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Soft Linden commented at 2015-12-21T17:30:41Z I haven't found any other JIRAs on this before the weekend, however I've found users struggling with it elsewhere: http://www.danantonielli.com/adobe-app-scaling-on-high-dpi-displays-fix/#comment-11533 |
Whirly Fizzle commented at 2015-12-21T17:30:49Z Yep, been getting lots of complaints from Firestorm users about this, especially since the Threshold 2 update. |
Soft Linden commented at 2015-12-21T17:33:37Z Workaround details for others linking here:
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Soft Linden commented at 2015-12-21T17:35:20Z Thanks for the confirmation, Whirly! Feel free to encourage Firestorm support to link directly to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11024?focusedCommentId=488265&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-488265 I saw this question come up in Firestorm Support group chat over the weekend and it didn't look like anyone had an answer yet. |
Whirly Fizzle commented at 2015-12-21T18:48:53Z Great thanks Soft! |
Whirly Fizzle commented at 2015-12-21T22:19:23Z I just wanted to add that this doesn't just affect those with a 4k monitor, "normal" sized screens have the same problem. |
Soft Linden commented at 2015-12-21T22:28:26Z Yup. 4k monitors are the most popular case, but these snapshots are actually from a 5k display. It's also going to include a lot of laptop setups. More generally, it would be anything with a DPI scale other than 100% configured in Windows 7/8/10. It would be unsurprising if we see a bunch of reports from people who get Surface Pro and Surfacebook setups over the holidays and find they can't use them with SL. |
Whirly Fizzle commented at 2015-12-21T22:39:12Z Yep. My guy with a 1920x1080 monitor defaulted to 150% DPI in Windows after the last Windows 10 update. This has been a problem since Win 8.1 really with the DPI scaling "enhancements". If those affected didn't suffer from the UI & text being too small then they suffered from the camera spinning when alt clicking or in mouselook, which also happens when system DPI isn't at 100%. |
Lassie commented at 2016-06-08T21:29:20Z, updated at 2016-06-08T21:29:48Z Does this 'fix' fix the SL search scaling? |
Soft Linden commented at 2016-06-08T21:35:47Z @LASSIE No. The internal browser rendering at the wrong scale is issue OPEN-234 |
Whirly Fizzle commented at 2016-10-17T07:04:40Z @Soft I think you may need a high res monitor to reproduce it. |
Soft Linden commented at 2016-10-17T21:22:37Z @whirly I don't currently have a good way to check this today. But see if the option in "Properties.png" above is no longer toggled automatically for these people. It sure looks like what people are seeing is the "compatibility mode" display scaling that Windows uses for old, DPI-unaware apps. It's an ugly scale that's applied by Windows' compositor after the app has done its own render. Our viewer still doesn't scale natively, which puts it in the category of old, DPI-unaware apps. So this blurry scaling would be the expected behavior. The correct solution would probably be to have the viewer make a call to SetProcessDPIAware, telling Windows that it does know how to scale. Then add a default "automatic" option to preferences, which makes Second Life slave the UI scale slider to the DPI of the current monitor. This would make Second Life a DPI-aware program that natively renders at the target resolution. Unfortunately it might also turn out that a lot of machines with HiDPI displays aren't beefy enough to run the full SL rendering engine at native resolutions without FPS dropping severely. I'm not sure what the most appropriate workaround is there, but it might mean SL has to offer its own optional upscale mechanism or add another option which makes Second Life not call SetProcessDPIAware, and enable that option by default for low graphics classes. Possibly an item for discussion in a TPV meeting? |
Steps to Reproduce
Actual Behavior
The GPU probe portion of our viewer tells Windows 10 to force-enable HiDPI mode. On a HiDPI display, this causes Windows to forcibly disable the pixel doubling that would otherwise render Second Life at a usable size. See the snapshots for the end result: Text is unreadably tiny. For example, the entire login field is less than an inch wide.
Because we cap the UI Scale setting to 1.4x and a minimum of 2.0x would be needed in order to actually use SL at native resolutions on HiDPI screens, the only workaround is to add the "--noprobe" flag to the launch shortcut and to manually adjust graphics settings instead of relying on automatic recommendations.
The most likely culprit would be an unwanted call to SetProcessDPIAware during the graphics probe.
Expected Behavior
Because Second Life is not DPI-aware, it should not do anything that overrides the compatibility settings.
Other information
Note: This will not reproduce on some Dell or Alienware systems unless you do a fresh install of Windows 10. The game management apps that they bundle appear to override the default Windows 10 behavior.
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