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High-DPI Monitors
Some modern monitors have a high number of dots-per-inch (DPI) in order to produce better-looking images; Apple brands this “Retina Mode” though standard off- the-shelf monitors with high DPI are also available.
Note : High-DPI monitors should be configured at half the physical resolution, ie a 3840x2160 monitor will appear as 1920x1080, ie a scale factor of 200%. Although your operating system may offer other resolutions or scale factors, eg 125%, 150% or 175%, these will result in artifacts or fuzziness because they don’t divide evenly.
High-DPI monitors have the drawback that for the same resolution, you get less “working space” in any application. For example, given two monitors with 3840 horizontal resolution, a standard-DPI monitor may be 36” across, while a high-DPI monitor is 24” across. The effective resolution of the high-DPI monitor is only 1920 pixels across (200%, 2:1), so the standard-DPI monitor lets you put two entire 1920- wide windows side-by-side, for example a standard SynthEyes window + floating graph editor + floating perspective view. Also, for the same view, a high-DPI monitor requires that four times more pixels be rendered per frame, reducing frame rates. The high-DPI monitor is prettier for sure, but the standard-DPI monitor may be more productive.
Tip : If you see inconsistent red line widths as you move supervised trackers around in the camera view (the lines get wider or thinner or change color slightly), you need to install a higher-quality cable from your display card to your monitor. High DPI monitors require high-speed connections to the GPU, and with cheaper/older cables, the GPU must fall back to sending YCbCr to the display, producing artifacts on thin colorful lines. (The Windows 10 advanced display controls can confirm this is happening; the only solution is to install better cables.)
Software such as SynthEyes must be specially written to accommodate high DPI values, to prevent text and graphics from being too small to easily see, integrating with high-DPI support offered by the underlying operating system (eg Windows, macOS, or Linux). Following sections will describe this support for each operating system.
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