Does 4k monitor support work on Windows 7?

[Coup27]

Getting a bit fed up of Windows 10. I tamed it quite well prior to the anniversary update but from what I can see it has essentially reinstalled Windows again and reset many things and broke some things which worked fine before.

I do want to get a 4k monitor soon and I did read a while ago that 7 lacked proper 4k support. Is this still the case?

Thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't think that Windows 7 "lacks" 4K support - rather, it doesn't support HiDPI displays and text scaling all that well, compared to Windows 10.

I was able to get VSR running on my 1920x1080P monitor, at a resolution of 2560x1440, just fine in Windows 7. But I had 1:1 scaling, so icons and text got tiny. (Which is fine with me.)

When I upgraded to Win10, and enabled VSR, it automagically tried to enable 1.25X text/icon scaling. Which, honestly, made it look not much different than 1920x1080P res, only the icons were "bulkier". I had to manually crank the scaling back down to 1:1, to get the desired effect.

 

[fastman]

I was running Win7 on a 1080 and a 4K and did a fresh install of Win10 and like it much better as both screens have the Task Bar on the screens with 10 and 7 did not.

 

[Coup27]

Apart from the taskbar being on both screens, does the 4k screen look just the same on 7 and 10?

 

[thewhat]

I very briefly tried both 7 and 10 at 125% scaling and I didn't notice any difference. Maybe it becomes evident with some specific use case.

Note that 10 has two different settings for scaling (one in the new Settings and the other in Control Panel under Display) and they work differently. For example, using the scaling in new Settings will make some parts of Windows blurry.

 

[tidy]

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[sweenish]

Scaling is fixed in 10. Not win32 scaling, but UWP stuff. There is a difference, and nobody ever seems to get that. Sure, in the end, your experience may still be garbage, but that's now on the developer of the program that looks awful, not Windows.

I think that even for win32, there are tools that can be used for better scaling, but devs don't use them.

 

[Coup27]

Scaling on Windows 7 and 10 is awful. 10's scaling is just marginally less awful.

Does Windows 7 support 4K? Yes.
Does Windows 7 scale well for a smaller 4K monitor that requires scaling to be usable? Not really, but neither does 10 in my opinion.

The critical piece of information you neglected to mention is what size of 4K monitor do you intend to get. If you're getting a 40" 4K monitor, then you won't need to worry about scaling, and Windows 7 will look perfect on it - it will look exactly the same as it does on a 27" 2560x1440 monitor (only with more usable area).

Windows 7 at 100% scaling on a 4K display will look the same as Windows 10 at 100% scaling on a 4K display, assuming the display size is constant.

It'll most likely be 24". I my current 23" 1080p screen is 96PPI so going much larger than 24" eats into my PPI gain from getting 4k.

 

[tidy]

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[fastman]

Apart from the taskbar being on both screens, does the 4k screen look just the same on 7 and 10?

The 4K is much shaper of course, Icons can be placed there but yes.

 

[sweenish]

Being on what is supposed to be a tech-centric forum, semantics are pretty important.

Blanket statements are logical fallacies in cases like this.

 

[tidy]

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[postmortemIA]

Scaling is fixed in 10. Not win32 scaling, but UWP stuff. There is a difference, and nobody ever seems to get that. Sure, in the end, your experience may still be garbage, but that's now on the developer of the program that looks awful, not Windows.

I think that even for win32, there are tools that can be used for better scaling, but devs don't use them.

Microsoft did good job blaming devs for the scaling issue. But the problem is not there. Today I can write Win32 app with latest Visual Studio and it will not perform scaling correctly... until I add code myself to handle it. F* that.

How come all apps on OSX work fine in HiDPI mode?

 

[sweenish]

OK, but your first sentence was also a blanket statement ("Scaling is fixed in 10") and then you went on to suggest that if your Windows scaling experience was garbage, it must be fault of third party devs (false, because parts of Windows still don't scale).

I led with one and nuanced it. You concluded with one. It makes a big difference in perception.