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I recently bought a very nice Lenovo Yoga 2. The screen is incredible, I can not look at my old monitor any more, reading on it is a dream

However, enter the issues of HiDPI and windows scaling and I have a few issues. Internet Explorer loads fine, and other MS applications look good. However, Chrome looks blurry along with Spotify... I have already unselected the "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays" However that makes Chrome and all other apps very small indeed on the 3200 x 1800 resolution.

So my current solution is to have Windows 8.1 scale everything and then disable the scaling in the program compatibility settings (right click the exe) but this means the tabs in Chrome are really really small.

I am looking for a solution where apps like Chrome and Spotify look as good as the other apps on my laptop. I realise this may be hacky for now, what does everyone else do?

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    This is a per-application setting. For chrome you should try to enter chrome://flags/#high-dpi-support in the URL bar and check that HiDPI-Support is set to "activated"
    – PeterT
    Dec 5, 2013 at 13:32
  • Thanks I did try this before but chrome becomes SLOW and well IE is a lot smoother at this resolution... any ideas? Dec 5, 2013 at 15:32
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    Try to force GPU-acceleration with settings like chrome://flags/#force-compositing-mode-2 and watch you CPU usage in the task-manager. It might help to define what exactly is "slow", is it reaction time while clicking on a link, is it irregular stuttering during scrolling?
    – PeterT
    Dec 5, 2013 at 16:10
  • Hey thanks - yeah its a little "juddery" when scrolling pages with lots of images for example. Like thechive.com I have enabled the GPU and it seems to be better. I will do some further tests. I do however find it odd that these are "experiments" in Chrome. But in IE they seem to work out the box... is IE now better than chrome?!?! Dec 5, 2013 at 16:46
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    Internet Explorer 10 and 11 use Direct2D for rendering while Chrome has to support all kinds of OSs for rendering, so naturally on some platforms IE will outperform Chrome when purely measuring rendering performance. This is compounded by Chrom using Skia for rendering. You could also try to compare with Firefox which also uses Direct2D under Windows afaik.
    – PeterT
    Dec 5, 2013 at 16:52

2 Answers 2

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As @PeterT noted in the comments, the correct way to do this in chrome is using chrome://flags/#high-dpi-support (and to force GPU rendering if it doesn't happen automatically).

I just had a similar experience with a relative's HiDPI Sony VAIO.

It isn't that these are "experiments" in Chrome, as much as just the fact that it is easier to enable them only on machines that require/support them. It would be nice to have the support for these features autodetected, but that isn't always so easy given the wide variety of hardware (and, more importantly, the wide variety of drivers) that are currently in use on different platforms. I doubt that the Microsoft applications has it enabled by default either - I would guess that it was enabled by Lenovo when they installed Windows on the machine.

As far as Spotify goes, you are out of luck. Spotify does not have HiDPI support and does not seem to have any plans to release it any time soon. See these threads on the Spotify forum for more details.

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    As someone who just started using Chrome in high dpi mode, I can tell you that this is really an experimental feature. The flaws I have noticed after using it for 10 minutes: Text kerning is bad, and title texts are not positioned correctly. However, once the feature will be stable, Chrome should be able to switch it on automatically, since "Windows 8.1 provides APIs for apps to know what the optimal scaling value is." reference Feb 24, 2014 at 0:13
  • Kerning is not just "bad"; it's absolutely atrocious: i.imgur.com/HLpb97Y.png
    – RomanSt
    Jul 24, 2014 at 16:27
  • @romkyns I have seen that happen if your browser couldn't download a font. Check if that's your problem.
    – Moshe Katz
    Jul 24, 2014 at 16:29
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Setting the flag via chrome://flags no longer works in the latest version of Chrome. Instead, you can set it via a registry key. Instructions to do it manually, or you can try this registry file (use at your own risk):

  1. Open regedit.exe
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Chrome
  3. Create the "Profile" key if it does not already exist
  4. Create a new DWORD value named "high-dpi-support" and give it a value of 1 (0x00000001)

That will enable the experimental HIDPI mode.

Now you need to disable Windows display scaling, since Chrome will handle it itself:

  1. Find a Chrome shortcut on your desktop or toolbar
  2. Right click and go to properties
  3. Find the "Compatibility" tab
  4. Check the "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" box

Now you're ready to restart Chrome. Make sure you've killed all Chrome processes via Task Manager (they do not die when you close all windows) and start Chrome via your shortcut. It should work, with all the normal bugs of the experimental HIDPI mode (for example, dragging tabs between windows doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to).

Tested in Chrome 35.0.1916.114

Update: This appears to be broken in Chrome 36 (it constantly resets the registry setting to "2"). I could not get it to work except by switching to the Chrome 37 beta channel, where the same registry hack works (no other change needed).

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  • the words I want to use to describe this whole situation would surely get me banned from this site... I'm using version 36 on a brand new Surface Pro 3 and this registry key worked for me ONCE. it then started resetting it. i'm trying v37 now
    – Simon
    Aug 7, 2014 at 4:43
  • to confirm - version 37 seems to work now. I dread to think how many people are using their nice shiny new hidpi laptops with blurry Chrome. I cannot believe this has lasted so long as an issue
    – Simon
    Aug 7, 2014 at 4:46

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