Optimal layout for 2 monitors 1080p#
Optimal layout for 2 monitors driver#

Most of the time you'll want to Keep Changes, but there are a few cases where the Revert option is useful. You can keep the changes or revert if you'd prefer to keep each display at its native resolution.

Optimal layout for 2 monitors driver#

This dialog appears whenever the driver detects a new mixed-DPI configuration: This makes the picture a little fuzzier than normal but keeps most applications looking the right size on both displays. When you connect a non-HiDPI display to your HiDPI laptop, the System76 driver will set the resolution of the internal display to half of its native resolution and adjust the scaling factor (from 2x to 1x) to match the external monitor. The System76 driver takes care of this automatically on HiDPI laptops. Generally, it's best to make all displays match the same scaling factor (all HiDPI or all LoDPI).

While HiDPI displays work well, things can get a little funny when using both HiDPI and LoDPI displays together. Fonts do have mechanisms to deal with this, so it’s not an issue there, but UI elements like icons and strokes around buttons will end up looking worse on a 1.5× display than a 1× display.įor a fantastic explanation on HiDPI, please read Cassidy's full series of articles available here. So with a higher resolution display, you get a blurry UI. Half pixels don’t exist, so the software would have to compensate with aliasing. That means a dot that is requested to be drawn at 1 virtual pixel now has to be drawn at 1.5 physical pixels.

Optimal layout for 2 monitors 1080p#

So, why pixel doubling and not just increasing the density on a 15' display from, say, 1080p to something like 2880×1620? To get you user interface at the same physical size as on the 1080p display, you would have to scale it by 1.5×. This makes the icon twice as crisp in any angles or curves, or allows for twice as much detail in the photo. For example, an icon or image might be 64 virtual pixels tall, but on a HiDPI display, it’s drawn with 128 physical pixels. In short, HiDPI refers to pixel doubling: drawing an image with twice as many physical pixels in each dimension than requested in virtual pixels. There's a great series of articles explaining the difference between high resolution and HiDPI. With 4K monitors becoming more prominent in the marketplace, it's crucial to define the difference between a high resolution display and a true HiDPI display.