In our original review of Asus’ Zenbook Prime, we lamented that the notebook’s high-density display—a beautiful 13.3″ IPS specimen with a 1920×1080 resolution—wasn’t terribly well supported in Windows 7. The operating system happily applied the correct PPI setting and enlarged text and widgets alike, but certain apps scaled poorly, and web browsing in particular involved ugly compromises.
At the same time, we expressed tentative optimism about Windows 8, whose improved support for high-density screens Microsoft proudly announced earlier this year. We figured the new OS would better harness the Zenbook Prime’s magnificent panel, especially in the newfangled Metro user interface.
Now, we’re about to see if that optimism was warranted.
We’ve grabbed the RTM release of Windows 8 from the MSDN Evaluation Center and loaded it onto the Zenbook Prime. This is the exact same build of Windows 8 that’s going to show up in stores and on pre-built PCs next month, so our experience should be representative of what you’ll see then. Has Microsoft made substantial improvements to high-PPI display support as we hoped, or did the company drop the ball? Let find out.
The problem with Windows 7
Before we get started, let’s clarify exactly what Windows 7 does wrong with high-density panels. By default, the operating system applies a 125% scaling setting on the Zenbook Prime. That setting enlarges user-interface widgets and text throughout the OS, which makes your typical Windows desktop (just to show one example) appear like so:
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The interface is roughly the correct size for the 13.3″ panel. More pixels are used to draw each character, each button, and each icon. The result looks and works rather well.
Sadly, problems persist in third-party applications. Older software often doesn’t support the scaling well, and skinned apps like Valve’s Steam client are hit-and-miss. Windows 7 isn’t really to blame, though. These issues are more about software vendors failing to adopt newer APIs—or not making their custom widgets and skins scalable. As high-PPI displays become more and more common, those vendors will hopefully fall in line.
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Third-party apps weren’t really our main concern when using the Zenbook Prime. We were more worried about web browsing. For pages to be readable on the 13.3″ 1080p display, they must be scaled up—and browser-based scaling is fraught with problems. Allow me to reiterate my explanation from the Zenbook Prime review:
You’ve got three choices. You can stick to the 100% setting, where text is much too tiny for comfortable reading. (See above. The fonts in Windows Explorer are the right size for the display; the ones on TR aren’t.) You can scale text independently of graphics, which often breaks page layouts. The third option is to tell the browser to scale up the page by 25%, and that wreaks havoc with images.
Oh, photos might look okay. You might not even notice the difference in text-heavy websites like Reddit or Craigslist, since fonts scale without putting up a fight. Go to any graphically heavy page, though, and you’ll see blurry pixels and scaling artifacts if you look close. Some browsers scale graphics better than others, but no matter what you do, the web is always going to look either too small or too ugly.
Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro deals with this problem with a little more elegance. The system’s 2880×1800 resolution has four times the pixel count of 1440×900, its reference resolution for UI scaling. In most of the operating system—and in Retina-ready apps—objects are drawn with exactly four times the number of pixels. When Retina-ready graphics aren’t available, like on the web, each source pixel is simply mapped to four pixels on the display. You get jaggies, naturally, but at least scaling is consistent, proportional, and free of weird artifacts.
For reference, here are examples of the artifacts Internet Explorer 9 introduces in the default scaling mode. That mode offers the least awful combination of layout consistency and readability, yet it still has obvious shortcomings:
Note the grey line above the podcast and system guide logos. IE9 also mangles the fading one-pixel lines next to the feature articles header. Artifacts like those are all too common on scaled pages. Of course, all images must be scaled, so even photos end up looking a little fuzzy. Slight fuzziness may be easy enough to get used to, but visual corruption is not.
For what it’s worth, Chrome handles itself a bit better in Windows 7 on the Zenbook Prime. When we pull up TR, Google’s browser only appears to stumble with the navigation bar. The white rounded rectangles that surround selected menu items have jagged edges, and an uneven line appears between the “More…” link and the menu that pops under it.
Windows 8 may not address Chrome’s scaling woes, but it’s hopefully going to take care of Internet Explorer. Or is it? Cue dramatic music.
Windows 8 on the Zenbook Prime
Out of the box, our clean installation of Microsoft’s latest operating system correctly applied a 125% scaling setting on the Zenbook Prime. In the desktop mode, Windows 8 looked… well, pretty much just like Windows 7 at the same setting. The desktop version of Internet Explorer 10, the default bundled browser, responded similarly to its forebear, scaling pages up automatically:
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It responded too similarly, though. Take a look:
Note the closeups above. IE10 running under Windows 8 exhibits the exact same scaling artifacts as IE9 in Windows 7. Microsoft has apparently overlooked that particular problem.
But perhaps that’s only because Microsoft focused its high-PPI compatibility efforts on the Metro interface. After all, Metro is what tablet users are going to run most of the time, and high-density displays are already widespread among today’s tablets—much more so than on laptops. Surely, then, the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 will handle itself better.
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Nope. The latest, most state-of-the-art version of IE, which is undoubtedly going to run on high-PPI tablets, still can’t scale pages properly without ugly visual screw-ups. And the problems are hardly exclusive to TR. We also noticed artifacts on Engadget:
Nature:
Neowin:
Penny Arcade:
…and Shacknews, among other sites:
Perhaps it will be up to web designers, then, to rework their sites in order to minimize artifacting on IE10. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect most major websites to make the requisite changes soon after Windows 8 arrives next month, however.
That’s not even the worst part, though. While studying IE10’s scaling flaws, we came across another, more worrying issue: it turns out that the Metro Start screen, and even default Metro apps, aren’t as comfortable on a high-PPI panel like the Zenbook Prime’s as we had anticipated.
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Here’s the Start screen, which looks the same at 1920×1080 regardless of the PPI setting chosen in the desktop control panel. On the Zenbook Prime, that means text labels are tiny, and tiles are much smaller than they would appear on a larger desktop monitor with the same resolution.
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Metro’s apparent lack of PPI awareness is especially obvious in the bundled news app. The screenshot above may not do it justice, but trust me: the text is much too small to read comfortably on a 13″ screen. As far as I could tell, there was no setting in the app to increase the font size, either. I was completely stuck at the default setting.
Well, that is, until I navigated to the “PC Settings” control panel and found the “Make everything on your screen bigger” setting…
“Make everything on your screen bigger”
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Tucked away under “PC Settings” is an option that imbues Metro with some level of support for high-PPI devices. It does exactly what it says on the tin—make anything and everything Metro-related larger, using more pixels to draw interface elements and text.
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Compare those screenshots to the ones from the previous page. Better, right?
Well, not quite. While everything appeared too small out of the box, everything looks too big in the enlarged mode. Tiles and other interface elements feel like they’re short on space, and text is scaled well above my comfort threshold. That’s especially apparent in Internet Explorer 10, which scales pages to an unreasonable level:
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Those artifacts we spotted earlier are still there. I’ll spare you another close-up, but you can clearly see the gray line above the TR Podcast and System Guide logos in the screenshot above.
I tried all sorts of maneuvers to find a proper, comfortable scaling level for Metro and Metro apps. One of those contortions involved following Microsoft’s own instructions and forcing a display size in the Windows Registry. It didn’t really help. Forcing the Zenbook Prime’s actual display size (13.3″) changed nothing, and entering a smaller display size (I tried 11.6″) made Metro balloon up in exactly the same way as the “Make everything on your screen bigger” setting (which, incidentally, became grayed out in that configuration).
Conclusions
More testing is needed on more devices before we can reach a definite conclusion. What this little excursion has taught us, though, is that Windows 8’s suitability for systems with high-PPI screens may have been exaggerated. Perhaps some obscure, undocumented option magically fixes all of the aforementioned problems, but if that’s the case, it should be neither obscure nor undocumented—remember, we were running the RTM version of Windows 8 on a production notebook.
I’m left a little disappointed and disillusioned. Based on what little I’ve seen, the impending flotilla of Windows tablets and laptops with high-density screens—which already counts the Zenbook Prime among its vessels—may get second-class treatment in Windows 8. Metro may end up looking either too big or too small, scaled web browsing may be as ugly as ever, and in the end, the old-school desktop mode may offer the best experience.
It’s like Microsoft has taken one step forward and two steps back. And it’s a crying shame.
Our experience is doubly disappointing in light of what Apple has been doing lately. Both the new iPad and the Retina MacBook Pro scale legacy content—including the web—with very few to no artifacts, and they guarantee UI widgets are the right size for the screen. Both of those machines have exactly four times the resolution of their standard-PPI predecessors: 2880×1800 on the MacBook and 2048×1536 on the iPad, up from 1440×900 and 1024×768, respectively, on older offerings. That means legacy content can be resized so that one source pixel equals four pixels on the screen, which minimizes problems.
The Retina MacBook Pro also supports other, intermediate scaling modes, which still work quite well. One of those modes, for example, approximates the interface and font sizes one would see at 1680×1050. No matter the setting, both OS X and Retina-aware applications scale standard-PPI bitmaps while seamlessly displaying text, vector graphics, video, and other high-PPI-capable content at the full resolution.
Now, to be fair, Apple only sells one computer with a high-PPI screen right now, and it has complete control over the hardware and software. Microsoft must support a multitude of machines (and discrete monitors) with varying panel sizes, PPI levels, and intended viewing distances. That must complicate things greatly.
Nevertheless, it seems like the folks in Redmond really should have offered at least a handful of different scaling modes in Metro. An intermediate setting between the default and “make everything on your screen bigger” modes would have looked great on the Zenbook Prime, for instance—yet we could find no such option no matter how hard we looked. The user experience suffered as a result, and Metro lost much of its appeal.
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