14 DAY TRIAL // App scaling has been quite a problem in Windows 10, with several Win32 programs being rendered incorrectly and becoming blurry due to limited support for high DPI settings.
And while the most recent Windows 10 updates improved the performance in this regard, there still are apps out there that look awful, even on Microsoft’s very own Surface Book (from my experience, one of these apps is instant messaging software Pidgin, which despite being regularly updated, it’s still scaled incorrectly in Windows 10).
With the release of Windows 10 build 17063, Microsoft introduces new options to fight blurry apps, and all of them are projected to become available for everyone with the release of the Redstone 4 update in the spring of the next year.
New tools in the latest build
First and foremost, there’s a new setting in Settings > System > Display > Advanced scaling that allows the operating system to automatically detect and try to fix apps that are blurry. This means Windows 10 all by itself tries different settings for blurry apps, choosing the one that looks best.
Additionally, there’s also a new toast notification that is displayed when blurry apps are detected, with options to fix or ignore them and to learn more about how to address this problem.
And last but not least, there are options to override global settings per each app by right-clicking on the exe file and going to Compatibility > Change high DPI settings > Override System DPI.
“In this flight we’ve made it easier for you to fix apps that become blurry if you dock/undock, RDP, or change display settings. Some desktop apps can become blurry in these scenarios. When this happens, you have to log out and back in to Windows to have these apps render properly. In this flight, you can turn on a feature that will enable these apps to be fixed simply by re-launching them,” Microsoft says.
Windows 10 Redstone 4 is projected to be finalized in the first quarter of 2018 and more improvements for app scaling could be announced as development advances.