Windows 10: Disable the automatic blur on apps which don't render HD

I just got a laptop with an HD screen for the first time. Many apps don't render in HD yet, so they don't provide enough information to create a high-res image on the screen. The way that W10 deals with this problem is by filling in the gaps between pixel information by blending the nearest pixels together. However, I strongly dislike this effect as it makes apps look "fuzzy" and makes me wonder if I need to get my eyes checked.

To give an example, here is an image with no blur effect (taken with Nesbox emulator):




And here is an image WITH blur (best viewed full-size to see the difference):




The Nesbox emulator I got these images from has a very easy "on/off" switch for this effect. I'm curious to know if there is a way to disable the blur effect in Windows 10 as a whole. Does anyone know how to do this?

:)

 

Dual monitors with different DPI settings do not give correct scaling

Hello Jayant and thank you for your reply.

As described in the threads you provided I updated my graphics drivers (though they were already on the latest version) and tried changing my screen resolution back and forth. Neither helped the situation sadly.

The solution that suggested editing the registry seems to be aimed at disabling DPI scaling for specific applications. However, this is not my aim as disabling DPI scaling would indeed remove blurring but text would stay unreadably small.

The Windows Dev Center article did confirm two things for me.

• There are DPI-unaware applications which will be scaled up by Windows making them appear blurry. This behaviour is correct as described in the Windows Dev Center article and as seen in the first image of the following article:
  
  http://www.anandtech.com/show/7939/scaling-windows-the-dpi-arms-race/3 These applications are not the problem I am describing, we cannot expect Windows to magically show DPI-unaware applications in high detail. An example of a DPI-unaware application is
  Sublime Text 2 and the older version of VLC as shown in the AnAndTech article.
  
• There are DPI-aware applications which experience blurring when there are two differing DPI scaling settings present. The application blurring occurs on the screen with the lower DPI scale. I do not know the behaviour when there are more than two screens
  with more than two differing DPI scales present. Examples of DPI-aware applications are Google Chrome and Visual Studio 2015.

A little experiment

Lets look at an example of bullet point 2 using screenshots of Google Chrome rendering a webpage. The screenshots were made using the Windows screenshot functionality and cropped in paint.net.

Image 1 - Correct DPI/scaling on HD screen

The first image is an example of proper DPI on the 1920x1080 (HD) screen. The 3840x2060 (UHD) is also connected, but DPI scaling is disabled (set to 100%) for both screens. In this scenario everything displays as expected, but let me remind you that this
is not a solution because at 100% DPI scale text on the 27" UHD screen is too small, as mentioned)



Image 2 - Incorrect DPI/scaling on HD screen

This second image taken from the same HD screen is clearly more blurry than the first image. In this scenario the DPI scaling for the UHD monitor has been set to 150% (and the user account has been logged out and in as recommended by Windows when changing
the setting). It appears that the scaling for the UHD monitor somehow affects the render on the HD screen, despite it having in fact the same settings as in the previous image. The blurring effect occurs in other applications like VS2015 and Windows Explorer
as well.



Image 3 - Correct DPI/scaling on UHD screen

The third and last screenshot is taken with the same settings as image 2, but from the UHD screen. As expected this image is larger because Windows requested from Google Chrome to render 150% pixels for the same area of the application to keep my eyes happy.
This and the first image assert that Chrome is a DPI-aware application which can indeed render sharp images at different DPI scales.



An interesting side note is that DPI-unaware applications do render at the prober 100% DPI scale without blurring when displayed on the HD screen with the settings used in image 2 and 3.

I hope this clears up what my concerns are because I can't get much more detailed than this.

 

Blurry text after upgrade to Window 10 1151

Hope This Helps-Calvin Mogilinski

Fixing Blurred Text In A Single App

Not all apps might be displaying blurred text in which case you can make a small change to fix it on a per-app basis. Right-click the problematic app’s icon and select Properties. Go to the Compatibility tab and under Settings section, check the ‘Disable
display scaling on high DPI settings’. Click Apply and it should solve the problem.



Fix Blurred Text That Is Consistent In All Apps

Open the Settings app and go to the System group of settings. In the Display tab you will see a slider that lets you change the size of text, apps, and other items so that they look better on your screen. The safest bet is to set it to zero i.e. 100%. If
you’re using a high resolution monitor though, this might render the text really tiny so try playing with this slider until you find what works best.Example below



After each change made to this value, you will need to log out and log in again. Needless to say, a little trial and error will be involved until you get it right

-Calvin Mogilinski

Source

 

It is not Windows that is doing that. It is your graphics card. It is using a scalier to scale those images to fill your screen. Since I don't know what laptop you have, I don't know what hardware you have. Thus I cannot really tell you what to do. But you should look though the settings of your graphics card.

Edit. NVM I looked at this NesBox, the blur thing as far as I can tell is purely something NesBox itself does. None of the other applications exhibit any type of blurring.

 

@logicearth - Thanks for looking around.

Quick clarification, the Nesbox thing was just an example so that I could show the difference between blurred and non-blurred imagery. Certain apps (like Spotify) are completely blurred, similar to the 2nd image, so that even the text on the page and the top toolbar are fuzzy. Nesbox itself renders in HD -- its toolbar and text are HD -- and only the game window it contains was blurry.

Apologies if I posted this thread in the wrong place. I'll look into graphics card options to see if I can find something.

 

Seems like you need to use this option: right-click app - Compatibility - Disable display scaling on high DPI settings.

For apps that actually change your resolution, you need an option in the GPU driver: for example Nvidia has under Display -
Adjust desktop size and position: Scaling=No scaling, Perform on=Display, Override games and programs

 

Thanks! This works, but has the unfortunate side-effect that no scaling is done at all and text and images are very small. Still, it will work great for some apps.