MAX 15 High Resolution Display Issues (DPI)

[S1ack]

At first thought a laptop display with resolution of 3200 x 1800 sounded great. However some programs handle it better than others.

Now, paring that display with a plain jane 1920 x 1080 via a docking station, presented some more problems. Windows 8.1 can mostly deal with it. Some wierd visual effects dragging windows from one monitor to the other - but once on the destination display things size appropropriately.

MAX 15 is a bit different. On either display parts are readable, while others are not.

Any ideas what to do?

On the 3200 x 1800 screen the left tree view is hardly readable...

Looks alot like this capture from the low res screen...

[Sam_Sharp]

This is all due to the display scaling setting in Windows.

In the control panel there's a setting under 'Display'...in Windows 7 you can set it to 100%, 125% or 150%.

Apparently in Windows 8.1, it automatically calculates the display scaling based on the resolution/size of the monitor: http://superuser.com/questions/629376/how-to-use-different-scaling-for-every-monitor

In Windows 10, I think you can do it on a 'per monitor' basis.

I find that having it on anything other than 100% causes weird issues with certain applications - LabVIEW being one of them.

[S1ack]

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@Sam_Sharp wrote:

In Windows 10, I think you can do it on a 'per monitor' basis.

I find that having it on anything other than 100% causes weird issues with certain applications - LabVIEW being one of them.

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Actually in Windows 8.1 I have it on a per monitor basis - before that, windows dragged from the 3200 x 1800 monitor became HUGE. FWIW LabVIEW 15 - front panels and block diagrams are quite well behaved. MAX 15, however seems to have frames that look fine, and others that are too small regardless of which monitor I use it on. I was hoping for some back door ini font tweaking.

[GatorChomp]

To my knowledge this issue is caused by Windows. The UI sizing is taken directly from Windows settings and that is likely why you're seeing this behavior. It sounds like the issue is happening to the device tree but not normal text windows and may be a result of how Windows chooses to scale these items. If this is causing usability issues for you, I would recommend you disable display scaling specifically for NI MAX which can be done by performing the following steps:

1. Right click on the NI MAX icon and select "Properties"
2. Navigate to the "Compatibility" tab
3. Check the box next to "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"
4. Click "Apply"

This probably doesn't fix the scaling problem but does keep the NI MAX window readable while allowing everything else to scale properly. Unfortunately there is no ini file you can modify this in for NI MAX. 
I would also be curious if this problem happens to tree views in other programs.

[S1ack]

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@GatorChomp wrote:

I would also be curious if this problem happens to tree views in other programs.

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I have not noticed any others...but still have not loaded all the tools expect to on this laptop. And the docking station is new.

The compatability switch helps with MAX readability quite a bit.

[CRoebuck]

3200 x 1800 is going to be tough to view at 100% even on a 15" screen ! (or maybe my eyes are just getting old)

Windows scaling on high DPI displays is still kind of funky even in Windows 10.

The API's are there, just look at the Microsoft Apps (especially the metro ones) and how well they handle scaling. Time to ask NI to make sure they're using them ??

TestStand is particularly tough on high DPI, the sequence view window looks great but the toolbar is next to useless.

Chris

[lmoseley]

Update for Windows 10

"Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" changed to 

"Override high DPI scaling behavior."

[AudioVideoDisco]

Another update to add, this time for Windows 10 with 4k screen:

I was having a problem with scaling after I upgraded to a Dell XPS 9570 (with 4k screen) - all of the items in the tree and all of the sub-dialog boxes in MAX (e.g. add software for a remote system) were appearing as tiny boxes that were unreadable.

To fix this:

1. Browse to where the application is located
2. Right-click on the application and select 'Properties'
3. Go to the 'Compatability' tab and select 'Change high DPI settings'
4. Select the 'Program DPI' and the 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour' checkboxes and then select the 'System' or 'System (Enhanced)' option (as shown below).

This option fixes the main issue I was having and I can now read the tree menu items in MAX. It doesn't immediately fix the same problem with the sub-dialog boxes (they still initially appear in a *tiny* state) but after dragging them around on the screen the DPI changes and they are readable.

[DougHarper]

Thanks very much !!! I was having this problem with a new monitor and your suggestions above solved it for me !!