> As an end user, I'm a fan of Apple's 'scaled resolution' solution. My Apple notebook renders the screen in memory at 3840 x 2160 and then scales that to fit the 2880 x 1800 physical display. The benefit of this approach is that you can smoothly scale the UI to suit your age/eyesight.
That's what Windows 8.1 does when you have two screens with very different DPI (physical). When I connect my Yoga Pro 2 (with "retina"-like resolution) to my external 23" screen, it renders most applications at the high resolution, and then downscales them so they have the same size on both displays. The biggest problem with this approach is that crisp fonts on windows rely heavily on rgb sub-pixel-rendering. If your application doesn't directly paint to individual pixels, it can't control the subpixels, and can only do greyscale antialiasing, which looks very blurred (especially next to my Yoga Pro, where text looks like printed).
You can tell windows "I know what I'm doing, give me the raw pixels", but that comes with a whole lot of other problems, and I've never seen a single app get that right.
(What I'd really like as a developer would be to develop in (real) cm, inches, and em. Have them exactly match the physical sizes, for mobile and desktop screens (projectors would pretend to be a desktop). Have an option to "snap" lines to physical pixels. And on non-hidpi screens, render everything with subpixel-awareness, which triples your horizontal resolution.)
That's what Windows 8.1 does when you have two screens with very different DPI (physical). When I connect my Yoga Pro 2 (with "retina"-like resolution) to my external 23" screen, it renders most applications at the high resolution, and then downscales them so they have the same size on both displays. The biggest problem with this approach is that crisp fonts on windows rely heavily on rgb sub-pixel-rendering. If your application doesn't directly paint to individual pixels, it can't control the subpixels, and can only do greyscale antialiasing, which looks very blurred (especially next to my Yoga Pro, where text looks like printed).
You can tell windows "I know what I'm doing, give me the raw pixels", but that comes with a whole lot of other problems, and I've never seen a single app get that right.
(What I'd really like as a developer would be to develop in (real) cm, inches, and em. Have them exactly match the physical sizes, for mobile and desktop screens (projectors would pretend to be a desktop). Have an option to "snap" lines to physical pixels. And on non-hidpi screens, render everything with subpixel-awareness, which triples your horizontal resolution.)