P870DM 4K AUO Display Scaling

Alright as promised, @johnksss @marios50 here's how the display looks with different scaling options in windows and how it looks at 1080p and 4K in game.

I tried to keep each picture sharp and shake free but you know how that goes. I used a camera because taking a screenshot wouldn't properly show how it scales.

Keep in mind, in real life, the difference is more noticeable.

First, 1920x1080, 100% scaling:

http://i.imgur.com/As4ESse.jpg

Second, 3840x2160, 100% scaling:

http://i.imgur.com/ku851c2.jpg

Third, 3840x2160, 125% scaling:

http://i.imgur.com/3L3yMzp.jpg

Fourth, 3840x2160, 150% scaling:

http://i.imgur.com/dGs1aEX.jpg

Fifth, 3840x2160, 175% scaling: (windows properties wouldn't open and a few things are broken @ 175% for some reason):

http://i.imgur.com/AcsaCVt.jpg

Sixth, 3840x2160, 200% scaling (this is a good spot, I use this for now):

http://i.imgur.com/m5NDUsv.jpg

This is a game (Dead or Alive 5 Last Round) maxed out @ 1080p with Anti-Aliasing!:

http://i.imgur.com/lfy5y6d.jpg

Same game @ 4K with Anti-Aliasing:

http://i.imgur.com/jnqP1bN.jpg

A different game (Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm) @ 1080p with NO anti-aliasing:

http://i.imgur.com/avWjUEm.jpg

Same game @ 4K with NO anti-aliasing:

http://i.imgur.com/s4AAMMe.jpg

Hope this helps, maybe later I'll try and get better pictures.

 

Quick question about the different scalings. So, it looks as though 1080p @ 100% scaling everything is sized about the same as 4K @ 200% if I am interpreting what I see correctly. That being the case, if you don't have any more usable screen space what is the selling point for 4K? It seems like the text on the screen in 1080p looked really bad, unlike text on a native 1080p display unless the photos are not doing it justice. It that correct, or just not a good photo? The only reason I ask is because if I were going to entertain the idea of going 4K resolution I would want everything to look just as good at 1080p as a 1080p screen normally would. (I am referring to quality of text on screen in this question and not gaming.) It never looked very sharp to me when scaled down to 1080p on Dell notebooks.

 

4K @ 200% has just a very tiny bit more screen real estate from what I can tell.

I would love to use 175% but sadly 175% is too glitchy for some reason.

I just stuck with 200% because everything looks good even non high-dpi aware apps are not really blurry. I want to use 150% but it's not as sharp for non high-dpi apps at 200%. For some reason, multiples of 100 (100, 200, 300%) look good while the other in between percentages aren't as good. Hoping the next big windows 10 update fixes this.

This display has 100% Adobe RGB color space. This is a huge difference from the 1080p display. It makes everything look much better in my opinion.

4K on this display scaled to 200% looks better and sharper than my brother's Alienware 17 120hz @ 1080p @ 100%. That's not even comparing the colors.

Also anyone is free to use any display scaling in between. I will most likely switch to 150% soon but kinda liked how nice everything looks @ 200%. In games 4K looks very nice. 4K videos looks nice.

And yes 1080p on the desktop is not sharp! The picture is very similar how it looks. In game the difference isn't as bad but is still noticeable.

I just realized 150% and 175% are the same image, I'll fix that in a bit.

 

a 4K screen with a resolution of 1920x1080 would NEVER look as sharp and crisp as a native FHD screen. Plain and simple, when an LCD screen does not operate at the native resolution, it looks a bit blurry and text is an absolute nightmare to look at. I'd never even consider 4K on a laptop, 4K = must have 34 inch screen. Just my 2 cents

 

This is true. However 4K with scaling that makes the real estate similar to 1080p, I say the 4K panel looks nicer.

4K @ 200% Scaling > 1080p on a native 1080p Panel

 

While that may be true, the problem is not the actual display, but rather, Windows crappy scaling.

For example, open explorer, any folder with files and stuff, notice how sharp the text is even if it was scaled right?

Perfect

now, open services.msc, or computer management, or gpedit.msc

then see how blurry the text is, as if, Windows did not adhere to the scaling on that particular page. This is my issue with scaling. It works in a lot of places just fine but in others it's broken.

One time I installed this antivirus called TrustPort Antivirus which uses a combination of the AVG scanning engine, Bitdefender Engine, plus its own engine. When scaled, it doesn't display well at all the buttons are all cut out and stuff. I know, poor programming on their part, but my point is not everything works great with scaling. To each their own obviously.

But this bring me back to one important question for j00.

You bought a 4K screen to have more real estate and room to work on as opposed to an FHD screen right? Sure, but then if you are going to have a 200% DPI scaling, then what was the point?? You lost Gsync and lost the ability to run @ 75hz stock or even higher.

not trying to be rude or anything brah, just doesn't make sense to me.

 

Simple:

1) 100% AdobeRGB color space. I work in photoshop, I had spent $1,200 on a Dell U3011 monitor just for 99% coverage awhile back. This is a huge deal for me. This is also why I had bought the 90% NTSC AUO display on my Eurocom Panther 5 in 2014 instead of the 120hz 1080p display.

2) Yes I was running at 200% but that was only because I wanted perfect scaling. @ 200% things like services.msc, gpedit.msc etc look good! They look blurry @ 125/150/175 but @ 200 and 300% they look fine. So I was expecting microsoft to fix this. Even if they don't I'll lower it to 150%. BTW the extra real estate was a bonus, that was not the reason I bought it. I didn't have much time with 150% scaling, my laptop died within, what, a week after I got it? No idea when I'll ever get it lol.

3) Gaming at 4K. 980M SLI is overkill for 1080p unless you're at 120hz. Also games look amazing at 4K on such a small panel. Even without AA games are extremely sharp. The 100%AdobeRGB color space compliments this very well. My laptop makes my 40" 4K Samsung UN40JU6700 look like crap in terms of color in games. Everything is very vivid on the small 4K panel and sharp of course.

Yes I lost a higher refresh rate and G-SYNC but to me it was worth it.

Hope that helps.

 

Font rendering with 4K at 200% vs native 1080P is the selling point for me personally.

Text and such looks much better at 4K (scaled at 200%) than any native 1080P display on a laptop I've encountered.

Coding all day makes font rendering a bit of a big deal for me.

Windows actually scales alright these days in my opinion. The issues I come across are some random third party apps that don't scale properly.

 

For anyone curious, the reason 1080P text looks blurry is due to lack of sub-pixel Anti-Aliasing/Rendering. This won't really affect game text however, as very few engines render text using sub-pixels anyway (that being said, AA techniques can use sub-pixel rendering so be wary of that).

HOWEVER, the only reason sub-pixel rendering doesn't work using an upscaled resolution is purely software/hardware. You could theoretically use the same technique as in sub-pixel scaling but with entire pixel blocks instead (since they are actually present when scaling 2:1 as done with 1080P -> UFHD/4K). Until it's implemented though, upscaling will simply appear worse due to lack of sub-pixel rendering. This may require hardware to do so though (as the OS needs to be aware that it can use said pixels and address them as sub-pixels instead to keep compatibility, which is currently not possible).

Until then, HiDPI on laptop screens is more a pain in the arse than a feature (from a pure scaling/resolution perspective, not including colour space/brightness benefits which may exist in some panels).

 

Just after your opinion on this and if you have measure the colourspace yourself, because the 4K is rated by AUO as 100% Adobe RGB but usually measures at 88-90% in real world. Definitely a jump up from the FHD which is around 55% Adobe RGB.

 

Between Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, the 4K screen looks the best to me on Windows 7. I am triple-booting the Sky X9 so I can easily compare them. I think it handles the scaling better and text looks much sharper to my eyes. I can actually force 175% scaling and 150% is tolerable, but Windows Explorer crashes with Windows 8.1 and 10 if I force it. Not sure why that is. 175% would be the best scaling option for a 17" screen.

I really don't care about G-SYNC and giving that up isn't a big deal to me. But, I really don't like having to use 200% display scaling for Windows 8.1 and 10. I love the huge desktop space with 100% scaling and it sucks that you have to trade that for comfortably readable text at 200% scaling. The main attraction of 4K to me is the massive desktop real estate, and having to forfeit half of it for text large enough to read without detaching a retina is a pretty sucky trade-off.

My personal preference is still 1080p, but I already knew this (based on past experience with 4K notebook displays) and it comes as no surprise to me. I've made my peace with it and I am able to put up with 4K in spite of this, but not being able to overclock the 4K screen is not a good thing. It's a real shame it is only 60Hz and the screen goes black at a higher refresh rate. If the LCD manufacturers were not so lame, the defacto standard for all high quality notebooks would be 120Hz and 60Hz would only be used for low-end budget crap from HP, Dell, Toshiba and Acer. Of course, NVIDIA has a self-serving interest in seeing 60Hz continue to flourish. If everyone had 120Hz notebook screens, the need for G-SYNC (and licensing fees to NVIDIA) would be all but non-existent.

 

I have not been able to measure it but expect it around 94% maybe 90% worse case like you said. My laptop died within about a week so right now I don't have it.

Don't you have that annoying issue in 7 where the titlebar text and the buttons are extremely big? That was my only problem with 7 running on a high-dpi display otherwise it was nice.

 

No, but remember you have a lot more UI customization that the derps at Micro$lop took away in Windows 8+ OSes. If you had that you might be able to adjust them down to normal size. I did see gigantic title bar buttons and text when changing scaling if I did not log-off and log-in to get everything in sync.

Have you heard anything about your laptop yet? Wonder why it is taking so long to get it fixed?

---

Here's a screen shot. The only problem I have is the search syntax box is way too wide and cannot be adjusted. The path syntax box is also way too narrow. It's like their sizes are reversed for some stupid reason. For whatever reason, 200% scaling locks them like that. The ability to grab and drag the divider bar between them to the left or right no longer functions. And, this only happens with 200% scaling. Based on what I could find on the web it is a known issue that Micro$lop doesn't care about enough to be bothered by fixing it.

 

4K looks ridiculously nice and is definitely a noticeable jump from 1080. Unfortunately it's a nightmare to use on a 15" laptop and I deeply regret going with that option. To be usable, it must be scaled to 200% unless you want to wear a telescope to read the text on screen. And I also like to use custom visual styles for windows, and literally not a single one of them works above 100% scaling. This infuriates me so much as I have to use the default windows themes then and they are ugly as hell :/

I hope the 4K screens become standard in the next few years though, as nvidia launches GPUs that support them. This will hopefully force people to make custom UI compatible with 200% scaling.

 

Amen to that! Tried it and truly hated it with a passion... the experience was absolutely horrible on 15" LCD.

 

Nothing at all, they haven't called and they never replied back to my e-mail...

Maybe I'll experiment with that if/when I get my laptop back. I've been using 7 on my dell laptop perfectly fine.

 

don't listen to these people as long as you are happy with what you got thats all that matters, yes I agree 980m sli is currently over kill for FHD, I can run any game easy all maxed out.....

 

It comes down to priorities for people, if they need the colour space or would rather have the extra battery life. It's nice to have the option

 

I´m pretty happy with 150% scaling (Win10) on my ZM´s 15" 4k Sharp panel.

 

Exactly, notebooks are hardly ever one size fits all, that's partly what keeps them more interesting than desktops.

 

That's interesting, @Meaker@Sager . Since I normally never check battery life, I haven't noticed whether going from FHD to 4K affected how long it can run on a fully charged battery. It's too late to check now since I never bothered checking when the 1080p screen was installed. So, I have nothing to compare against.

 

It takes more power to backlight (the screen is less transparent) and drive that number of pixels.

 

It definitely explains why I only got 1 hour of battery life.

 

The difference can be large for lower power devices, though you should get a bit more than 1 hour.

 

I have measured it. It is actually 100% in fact is capable of doing more than 100%. But have many dips and pops on the tone response curve which if you are a Profesional working with images is sort of an issue. Still better than the HD and only reason I got it.

 

On p377sma with 4k (100% brightness) and 95% of battery life i have 2h05mn

 

That sounds about right for that machine

 

I can get 2 hours now ever since I went from 980m sli to desktop 980.

 

Single GPU FTW, less headaches always no more hunting down good SLI profiles

 

But lower bench score

 

Much lower bench score.