win8.1 DPI scaling and WindowCOMPs

Beginners
1

I’m trying to figure out how the DPI scaling in Windows 8.1 affects TD.
Right now I’m displaying on two monitors, extended:

Laptop display is running at 2880x1620 (native)
Projector display is running at 1920x1080 (native)

When I use the (control panel > appearance and personalization > display) “change the size of all items” dialog, the TD user interface will get larger and smaller as I move the slider right and left, as will my other applications’ interfaces. If I have a Window COMP on the second monitor, though, it too will sometimes change in size when I mess with the DPI scaling.

So, for example, I have a blank black window with no operator attached, size 1900x1060, justified in the center of monitor 1, no border. I should see a black rectangle on my projector, with just 10 pixels of my desktop background showing through on all sides. With DPI scaling at the far left (smaller items), this is the case. At the furthest right setting (bigger items), the window gets scaled up, so that only by setting the Window COMP size to 1260x700 do I get the same result. At the second DPI setting from the right, it’s something like 1510x840. For all the rest towards the left they are as expected – like the leftmost – no weird scaling.

I’ve been running into weird scaling issues on second monitor output for a while now, and in the past have just fixed them by setting all monitors to the output res I eventually want and restarting… I’m feeling like maybe this is the source of those issues I’ve been having.

Shouldn’t the Window COMP be immune from DPI scaling – so when I give it a TOP of whatever resolution it always accurately spits that out onto the monitor? Is there a way to make it so? Is there a way to make this whole scaling thing understandable or predictable?

2

This is an issue I just found a fix for yesterday actually. I was previously telling windows to not do any DPI scaling for TouchDesigner, but in some cases on Windows 8.1 that was getting ignored. This means that Windows was lying to TD and saying the monitors were resolutions that they weren’t. A new setting seems to have fixed the issue for 8.1, but it needs some more testing.
For now you should keep your DPI at 100% to have the Window COMPs work properly. If it’s a huge issue I can back port the fix into the 30000 series builds in a week or two, but the fix will come in the 40000 when those come out regardless.

3

Nice. Like you said, if the scaling is at 100% everything seems to work, so it was for me more of a curiosity than an urgent problem. In the meantime I’ll just keep my laptop monitor resolution lowered to 1920x1080 to keep the UI usable with 100% scaling.