“Though Windows 7 doesn’t quite have the same experience when it comes to resolution and scaling control as OS X does – it can be a bit of a chore to get it just the way you like it – it’s still quite useable on the Retina MacBook Pro’s 15” 2880 x 1800 pixel screen. I recommend running Windows at full resolution with the 150 percent scaling setting – that seemed to give the best overall usability. ‘Retina’ class desktop displays are still a relative rarity today, so it will be some time before software developers adapt applications to best take advantage of such a resolution. In the meantime, you should have no trouble running Windows on the Retina MacBook Pro if the need arises.” A look at how Windows 8 handles the display would’ve been nice, too.
Thom, what info on how Window handles the display is missing?
I thought he was thorough. Windows runs the display at it’s native resolution, but the Apple software adjusts the DPI scaling. Some apps handle it better than others (Office is given as an example of an app that handles some parts of DPI scaling well, and other parts poorly).
The mouse cursor looks crappy.
As D-Master-D pointed out below, Thom is referring to Windows 8. The article does reference another article which explains the Metro apps in Windows 8 have a new scaling system but in the consumer preview Desktop Mode uses the same system as Windows 7.
Going back to the original article, there are some interesting comments regarding Windows 8 running on the MacBook.
“A look at how Windows 8 handles the display would’ve been nice, too.”
The are basically two different categories of applications in Windows when it comes to resolution scaling: those that are DPI aware and those that aren’t. Only applications that explicitly call SetProcessDPIAware are considered DPI aware.
If an application is not DPI aware, Windows automatically scales the window and it will look correct. However, this is an image scale and therefore won’t take advantage of the higher resolution of the retina display. It will look identical to a 1440×900 monitor.
If an application IS DPI aware, then it is the application itself that does the scaling. So all those screenshots are applications that declared themselves DPI aware and yet failed to implement it correctly.
Microsoft changed that starting with Windows 7. SetProcessDPIAware is deprecated and not recommended; instead, DPI-aware apps are to declare themselves as such in their manifest. One can hard-code DPI=true XML code into their manifest, or, starting with VS2010, devs can check the “DPI-Aware” checkbox in the manifest panel. [/q]
I think the problem here might be that (pre-Metro, at least) Microsoft’s “high DPI” SDK documentation focuses on 150% DPI. The Windows 7 SDK documentation says, “The standard DPI settings are 100% (96 DPI), 125% (120 DPI), and 150% (144 DPI). The user can also apply a custom setting. Starting in Windows 7, DPI is a per-user setting.”, so developers of DPI-aware apps target those DPI settings (adjusting their code and providing graphical resources (like icons) for each of those DPI settings). But Retina display is 200% DPI, so lots of DPI-Aware Windows apps wouldn’t handle that in optimal fashion.
My comment is “very” out-of-topic but I am seriously thinking on replacing my macbook pro main OS to Windows because the poor memory management I see in OS X.
I run three virtual machines with 1Gb of RAM each one and my computer (with 8Gb RAM) starts to swap contents to disk, the “inactive memory” is never freed, the “free memory” is around 40Mb and everything gets incredibly slow and makes the computer hard to use with nothing more than VMware Fusion running on top of the host OS.
The same three virtual machines in a Windows box with 8Gb make the system to use barely 4Gb, letting 4Gb free for more Windows apps.
Edited 2012-07-24 14:59 UTC
Lion memory management sucks. It’s a fact.
But I think the problem is solved with Mountain Lion at least I’ve found a much better memory management using the developer releases of Mountain Lion in my MB Air.
ML hits the app store tomorrow so.. Give it a try!
I’ll do that. Thanks!
Saludos desde Bolivia.!
For me I always got the feeling that Snow Leopard and Lion were kicking the can down the road to keep the legacy systems happy before they made a big change that would kill off support for older hardware. One of the biggest changes have been the move over to OpenGL 3.x as the basis of their graphics technologies rather than OpenGL 3.x merely being something ‘tacked on’ the side but with little integration. I’m on Mountain Lion right now and I haven’t had any problems yet but compared to Lion t is far more stable than Lion and as for Snow Leopard – I love when I hear revisionist history when Snow Leopard was released and people on Macrumors to declaring that they’ll stick with Leopard because Snow Leopard sucks, it’s buggy and doesn’t have enough features to justify an upgrade.