MacBook Retina with Thunderbolt Display - Windows 7 Resolution problem

[haswell999343]

I'm running Bootcamp 5.0.33 on Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt Display. In Windows 7, the display looks correct on the mac book pro. On the Thunderbolt Display, the resolution in Nvidia control panel says 2560 x 1440. However i noticed the resolution on websites such as whatismyscren resolution says it's set to1707 x 960.

The text is definitely blurry so i don't think i'm getting the correct resolution.

 

[mm201]

Which browser are you running? As a heads up, Chrome doesn't support Retina on Windows. You must use Firefox or IE. And because the Windows GDI was written in the 1980s, it can't upscale interfaces and continue to display smooth text like Cocoa can.*

Also it's normal for sites to report a lower resolution than you're running. This is because to get a correct page layout, the browser needs to lie to the site about how big the screen is since it scales up everything. Sites in Safari will only report 1440x900 on the 15" rMBP screen. 2560x1440 / 1.5 = 1706.666x960

It doesn't help that DPI is a global setting on Windows, whereas on OSX it's per-monitor. Multiple monitors with Windows on the rMBP are a bad experience right now.


*WPF does a much better job of scaling and is as good as Cocoa in just about every way. The problem is Microsoft isn't as heavy handed as Apple in forcing developers to use the latest technologies, so the vast majority of applications still use the antiquated GDI.

 

[haswell999343]

i'm running google chrome.. i'm installing windows 8 now to see what that looks like.

Which browser are you running? As a heads up, Chrome doesn't support Retina on Windows. You must use Firefox or IE. And because the Windows GDI was written in the 1980s, it can't upscale interfaces and continue to display smooth text like Cocoa can.*

Also it's normal for sites to report a lower resolution than you're running. This is because to get a correct page layout, the browser needs to lie to the site about how big the screen is since it scales up everything. Sites in Safari will only report 1440x900 on the 15" rMBP screen. 2560x1440 / 1.5 = 1706.666x960

It doesn't help that DPI is a global setting on Windows, whereas on OSX it's per-monitor. Multiple monitors with Windows on the rMBP are a bad experience right now.


*WPF does a much better job of scaling and is as good as Cocoa in just about every way. The problem is Microsoft isn't as heavy handed as Apple in forcing developers to use the latest technologies, so the vast majority of applications still use the antiquated GDI.

 

[mm201]

I'm afraid you're SOL for the time being. You're dealing with two different bugs:
1. Windows doesn't support different DPI scales for different screens. You can either make stuff on the rMBP way too small or make stuff on the external way too big, or a little of each which your setup seems to be.

2. Chrome doesn't support High DPI at all. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=149881 You can use Firefox 22 or IE.

Rumour has it Windows 8.1 will be fixing multiple monitor DPI issues, but it's still just a rumour.
Edit: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-81-may-get-promised-automatic-desktop-display-scaling seems to corroborate my rumour.