Do you use a Retina/HiDPI screen?

Do you use (or does your dev machine have) a Retina or HiDPI screen?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Here’s an explanation of what HiDPI is - from Steve Jobs when Apple brought out their first Retina products:

And this article goes into further detail: Confused about HiDPI and Retina display? ― Understanding pixel density in the age of 4K | EIZO

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When is a display “high DPI” and when is it “low DPI”?

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I would guess if there is DPI scaling at all (anything above 1:1) then it’s HiDPI, if it’s 1:1 (no scaling) or less (never seen it but could happen I guess?) then it’s LoDPI?

I still so love how Apple ‘invents’ words like Retina even though display scaling existed years prior. ^.^;

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I never do any explicit scaling.

I just use screens on their native resolution…

My screens at home probably count as LoDPI, as both of them predate the first retina, and therefore the HiDPI hype.

My screens at work ar both 4k, 19". Don’t want to count actual dots per inch now :smiley:

Though as far as I understood you @OvermindDL1, my mobile counts as HiDPI then, as I use a Pixel 4 XL as you do.

There is also a “fallback” screen I sometimes use, Its a 32" 1080p device from ~2005… Its regular use is as a screen for our home-media setup. (Its a plain old dumb-but-“flat”-TV)

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That’s what I prefer, even if it is an extreme PPI screen (537PPI!) I still prefer things at full native 1:1 ratio, I like getting the most out of my pixels. ^.^

Correct, every android phone I’ve ever seen in almost a decade is a HiDPI that’s well above Retina.

Do you have forced 90 FPS system-wide in your options or do you keep it at throttled FPS (90 when scrolling and such, 60 otherwise, it supposedly saves power but some basic tests of mine didn’t show it enough for me to care about).

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“Smooth Display” is active. Never tried without it.

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Smooth display is the adaptive 90 FPS setting, to enable systemwide forced 90 fps (which can make some broken games that assume 60fps act a little funny, lol) you go into developer options and enabled forced 90hz refresh rate. :slight_smile:

Nope, sadly no developer mode, forbidden by company restrictions. And since the mobile is actually owned by them and used by me, I’m careful to not violate those policies, regardless if they are enforced by software in the back or not.

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Ah yeah if you don’t own it that’s a good reason, lol.

All my work stuff on my (personal) phone is in a “Work” island (a sandboxed user profile essentially) so that stuff can’t touch anything else on my phone. ^.^

I’m too poor for those nice screens :man_shrugging:.
What I usually do is to set the font sizes in the UI very small, to make sure that I can still have a lot of text/code on the screen at the same time.

I’d love one of those ultrawide screens at some point that are essentially the size of two normal screens right next to one-another.

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Yeah, use the work profile as well. Still, debeloper mode and holes in the adb protocol made it possible to get root even without rooting, only a handfull of devices was ever affected and that has never really been confirmed, it was just a theoretical vector. bit that vector is the cause for forbidding dev mode for company owned devices.

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What ODL said… if it’s anything other than 1:1 then it’s likely to be HiDPI.

The idea actually predates Retina, I was using a 32" Dell display with quite a high res, scaled down to 1920x1200. The benefits of this were:

  • Smoother fonts
  • You could push the monitor further away so it was not right in front of your face (which you have to do with high-res small-displays)

You don’t have then set to 4K tho do you? The text will be tiny :upside_down_face:

Which OS are you on? Does it offer you scaling options? Try them - it should improve the image greatly.

Displays have come down a lot in price, you can get 4K displays pretty cheap now (if you do, I would use with scaling) there isn’t any good reason to use 1:1 now, particularly since most OSes offer desktop management click multiple desktops, split screens etc.

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I’m not sure how exactly they are set up.

I do not have access to that menu in windows, domain policies restrict access…

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Can you take a screen grab with the banner thread page in full screen?

Is it like this:

Or more like this:

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More like the upper, though there is a VM in-between. Also I tend to adjust fontsizes or zoom per application rather than have a global scaling of everything.

Windows 95 already had such a feature and it didn’t work well, early Linux desktops had such an option and it didn’t work well. So I just tune applications rather than systems in this regard.

Also virtual box might do some scaling on its own I’m not aware off. I’ll check a windows native browser tomorrow.

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If it looks more like the first then you have scaling of some sort switched on :+1:

I haven’t used Windows in a long time but I remember scaling was horrible on it when I tried it - I hope they’ve improved since. It is really good on a Mac, in fact all modern Macs ship with a default that is roughly scaled at half the actual screen resolution. I have no idea what it’s like on Linux as my only real experience with Linux is via terminal.

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Only KDE does it decently, and more so on Wayland as I recall, but it does do it very well that way.

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At work, I have 2 Thunderbolt (2560x1440) displays and the laptop (15" Retina) on the side, mostly for email.

At home (I work from home often), I have two older 27" iMacs (both 2560x1440 - one acts as just a monitor) and an AOC 33" 2560x1440.

Nice part about the older 27" iMacs is they can be used as monitors when they outlive their normal use with Target Display mode and a mini-dp cable! :slight_smile: Amazing how 10+ year-old Apple technology is still pretty decent! Not sure the newest Apple hardware will have that sort of longevity.

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iMac Pro here, “5K” screen: 5120x2880.

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