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I recently just moved to Windows 7 and I noticed that many of my older third-party apps didn't look so good at the high DPI I had set (150dpi versus the typical 96dpi). After searching the web for ways to get my apps to look good again, I stumbled upon the "Windows XP style DPI scaling" option. I enabled it and suddenly the apps looked good again.

While I'm happy, I'm also suspicious. What did I lose by enabling this feature?

Could someone explain to me the differences in how the screen is rendered with and without this feature, or explain the trade offs of using it?

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This answers your question rather well. In short, XP mode scales up the font and UI object sizes as if you'd gone and adjusted your theme's size settings, which can cause some graphical anomalies in some apps that're hardcoded to use default font and icon sizes.

"Vista" mode draws applications as standard 96 DPI to an off-screen buffer, and scales them up using your graphics card's texture resizing routines. If you've ever loaded an image with a lot of fine pixel detail into an image editor and resized it up, you'll probably find the induced fuzziness similar.

IMHO, they're both terrible hacks to get around the fact that truly DPI-independent applications are nearly nonexistent. Shame, really.

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I really don't think the "XP mode" is a hack; it's just that (as you say) most applications don't properly support high DPI. Thus, the addition of Vista mode, which is certainly a hack and must obviously be quite ugly (I haven't seen it, but there's no way for it not to be), but at least with that you probably won't go blind from squinting... – SamB Dec 8 '10 at 16:48
This description only applies to DPI-unaware applications. It's understandable that DPI-aware applications aren't common - most GUI toolkits make it a major PITA to achieve that. WPF is an exception but it is unfortunately sometimes a PITA in other ways, including non-portability. Here's a working link on this topic: DPI scaling in Windows Vista – romkyns Feb 6 '11 at 10:08
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