[arch-general] Fractional HiDPI

[ente]

On Mon, 2019-07-29 at 13:21 -0400, Jonathan Behrens via arch-general
wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 12:07 PM Yurii Kolesnykov <root at yurikoles.com
> >wrote:
> > Hello archers,
> > I’m looking to buy "24 4K monitor, the resolution is seems to be as
> > twiceas FullHD, but I don’t wan’t to use it as 2x, since I have bad
> > eyes and doscaling of fonts across all desktops on my current "24
> > FullHD monitoranyway. But I didn’t tried a factorial DPI yet on the
> > old one, since itdefinitely will look blurry.
> > So I want to get some suggestions from community. Does Factorial
> > screenDPI works good now across KDE and GNOME? On Arch Wiki I found
> > onlyinformation on factorial DPI in GNOME. I know that macOS
> > supports it wellsince last fall.
> > Had anyone tried a factorial whole screen DPI? Or it will be better
> > tostay as I’m now, just set 2x DPI for whole screen, and manually
> > adjust fontin every desktop/app/os?
> 
> I've experimented some with display scaling for HiDPI monitors on
> GNOME.For good looking fractional scaling, I found that l needed to
> use nativewayland applications and that things using XWayland were
> blurry. This wasfine for all the main GNOME applications (I didn't
> try KDE), but I hadproblems with Firefox and Emacs. Now I just set
> everything to 2x scalingand then zoom out when I want to fit more
> text on the screen. Another pointto consider is that regardless of
> whether you do fractional scaling, you'llhave to run wayland if you
> have multiple monitors and want to use thedifferent scaling factors
> on them.
> I also didn't quite understand your comment about not wanting 2x
> scaling.If normal 1080p is hard to see, do you plan to run with 1.5x
> scaling anduse even more font scaling or are you thinking of picking
> something like2.5x scaling? Personally it sounds like you'd be better
> off trying to get alarger monitor than one with super high DPI.
> Jonathan

I am using a dual-screen setup with a regular full-hd and a 4k. To
adjust the 4k to a similar resolution as the full-hd I played a lot
with randr and fractional scaling. The most stable and best looking
solution I came up with: I run the 4k screen not at 4k but at a lower
resolution. The screen does an upsampling. This solved many issue and
foremost it reduces the rendering effort: 4k rendering and downscaling
puts unnecessary pressure on your CPU/GPU. Modern screen should be
easily able. My 4k run at lower resolution does not show any fragments.
Furthermore I own a 13" laptop that natively runs at 1440p. Since
running it at full-hd, battery lasts much longer and system hiccups got
reduced a lot. A higher resolution on a 13" is a waste. The screen
looks great at full-hd with upsampling.



regards, ente