14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest annoyances in Windows 10 Anniversary Update affected high DPI displays, as many Win32 programs were rendered incorrectly and thus caused issues such as blurry fonts, incorrect size for desktop icons, or tooltips that looked odd even though they were generated by the OS.
With the Creators Update, however, these problems might finally be fixed, as Microsoft spent a considerable amount of time trying to improve performance on high DPI displays.
In most of the cases, in order for an application to be rendered correctly in Windows 10, developers need to update their software to include the most recent technologies that Microsoft implemented in Windows 10, so the best thing you can do is to get in touch with app makers and ask for updates.
Microsoft says that it was particularly focused on improvements for desktop application developers, and the company details them in a lengthy blog post here.
But as far as end users are concerned, there are a bunch of new features that can also help them deal with problems experienced with apps that are rendered incorrectly on high DPI displays.
Helpful option for end users
For example, starting with the Creators Update, every process has new options in the Properties screen that allow users to change DPI settings and override the default behavior by forcing the scaling to be performed by the application, the system, or by a special enhanced mode generated by the system.
Microsoft explains that the “System (enhanced)” DPI scaling mode was developed to deal with apps that simply can’t render correctly, and while it proved to be efficient in many cases, there are some limitations, so it can’t scale GDI+ and DX content, bitmap-based UI elements won’t look crisp, and users won’t be able to determine when it’s recommended to enable this mode.
“There is new functionality in the Creators Update that results in text and primitives rendering crisply on high-DPI displays for GDI-based apps only. For applications that are GDI-based Windows can now DPI scale these on a per-monitor basis. This means that these applications will, magically, become per-monitor DPI aware. Now keep in mind that this solution is not a silver bullet,” Microsoft says.
Desktop icons have also been updated to be properly rendered on high DPI scales, and Office 2016 also received improvements in this regard, so end users should feel a big difference after installing the Creators Update.
The Creators Update will launch today via the Windows Update Assistant and will become available for more users on April 11 via Windows Update.