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I am attempting to use an external Acer monitor (1920x1080 max res.) with my OS X Mavericks Retina display (2880x1800). In Windows 7 (through Bootcamp), the OS looks great on the Retina display of my MacBook Pro, but on the external monitor, everything is scaled up. I understand that this is because of the high pixel density on the Mac, where essentially each pixel is represented by 4 pixels (or so I'm told), but I could not find a way to compensate for it on the monitor.

Now, when I run Windows 7 on OSX through Parallels and put in full screen on the external monitor, it works perfectly, and opening up the Screen Resolution window in Windows shows that the resolution of the monitor is 3840x2160, to compensate for the high pixel density on the Mac side.

How can I essentially fake this high resolution in Bootcamp so I get the same effect as I do in Parallels? I have found nothing useful on the Internet, but if it has been already solved somewhere, I would greatly appreciate a link.

And for those wondering why I am using both Bootcamp and Parallels, I use some very memory-sucking programs (Solidworks, AutoCAD) that just don't run as well in Parallels with a shared memory as they do in Bootcamp with all memory for Windows.

Thanks you very much in advance, Jordan

4 Answers 4

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I managed to fix this resolution issue by lowering the color depth to 16bit for the external display. Not exactly sure why was this necessary, maybe for some reason Windows cannot allocate enough video memory for both displays?

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    Thanks for your comment, Igor. I actually figured it out a little while ago, but I thought this thread was dead so I didn't update it. It turns out that I had the pixel density set to 300%, so once I put the DPI back to 100%, and set my MBP resolution to 1920x1200 instead of 2880x1800, and my monitor to 1920x1080, everything worked perfectly.
    – jordanryle
    Aug 26, 2014 at 16:01
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I tried several different DPI settings and several different resolutions for my MBP. Wasn't happy with any of them.

I hear that Windows 8.1 allows you to set different DPI settings for each monitor. That would be nice...

The solution I'm happiest with is:

  • Put the external monitor in front of me. Tell Windows it is my primary monitor, where the start menu goes. Set the magnification to 100% and run most programs on this monitor.
  • Set the MBP to full retina resolution, 2880x1800, on the left of the monitor. Only use it for Firefox, and don't ever run Firefox on the main monitor.
  • Go into Firefox's about:config settings and set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2.25.

Now almost all of the UI elements of Firefox are scaled up and look great. (Exceptions are the window minimize, maximize, and close buttons in the upper right corner, any checkboxes that appear in websites, and the "Save File" dialog box.)

The main benefit to my beefy new MBP is the super-fast multi-core processor and the SSD disk. Everything is so much faster now that I would've settled for non-retina resolution on the built-in MBP screen. But since my habit was to leave Firefox open on a dedicated screen most of the time anyway, this solution allows me to use the full retina resolution for webpages and Gmail and have other applications look normal on the external monitor.

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The issue here is Bootcamp - I had the exact same issue, when I realized the Bootcamp is "controlling" part of the Display settings, along with iTunes.

Macbook Pro Retina 15, Windows 7 through bootcamp

This will sound weird, but, i restarted the mac with a bootable usb drive with Win 7 installation and during the install you have an option to choose the Drive where windows will be installed, i then deleted the macosx/bootcamp partition, restarted and all the DPI/pixel/scaling/resolution issues are GONE.

Get rid of Bootcamp - if you can :)

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For Windows 10 with Bootcamp (macbook pro mid 2014), I managed to fix it by doing the following:

  1. Go to System -> Display
  2. Select "Advanced scaling settings" changed the value (I put 100). this will prompt you to restart your user session
  3. After logging back, follow the same steps, and clict "revert scaling settings", you will be logged out again, when back both screens should scale nicely.
  4. There is still a glitch when moving a windows to the external monitor but then it is fine.

Bit of an hack but easy to do.Sorry to dig out the thread, hope it will help...

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