High DPI support

[morriw]

High DPI support has always been a little wonky, but after upgrading to 6.0, it has gotten worse.

I use my high DPI laptop with a normal external monitor. My laptop is set to 250% zoom and the external monitor is set to 100% zoom. When I start Virtualbox Manager with this set up, it looks okay for my laptop, but if I drag it to the external monitor, everything is too small. If I set my laptop to 100% zoom, start Virtualbox Manager, and then change the zoom back to 250%, it looks great on my external monitor, but everything is too big on my laptop.

[morriw]

With zoom in place

[morriw]

Switching zoom after startup

[nmcmurray]

This recently became a huge problem for me as well. I can't read the text in the VB GUI anymore. I'll attach my screenshot against this page to show the difference. The display looks the same on both of my monitors. My laptop display is primary at 3840x2160, and my external is at 2560x1440, with Windows scaling set to 250% and 125% respectively.

[Socratis]

Do not set the Windows scaling from withing Windows, it's getting complicated.

Instead go to the VirtualBox Preferences » Display » Scale Factor: set it to 200%.

[Chuck vdL]

Not changing the scaling in windows is NOT a option. I don't know anyone who can run full 4K resolution on a 15" laptop screen and still make out the text, menus, etc. With a small sized but full 4K resolution native display as is now coming in many high end laptops (I've personally worked with both a DELL and Lenovo system like this) you simply MUST run the display scaled in windows in order for it to be useful for ALL your work.

Like the filer of this issue I have the same setup, native 4K 15" display on the X1-carbon scaled to 250% in windows display settings, external 27" 2.5K display at 100% scaling.

No matter which display is primary, the VB manager window takes on un-usable sizes for both the full window, the individual sections, and fonts when on the external display. If the window is dragged from one screen to the other and back again it gets even worse! If I drag a windows app window, such as file mangler, from the 4K to the 2.5L, it is initially at 250% scale as you drag it across, once completely onto the 2.5K monitor it then rescales down to 100%. When I do the same thing with the VM manager, it never scales down.

Things are not so bad if the native display is primary, except that then every window opens on the smaller monitor, which is not desired. And the windows end up 2.5x size if moved to the larger external display. This is really a pain for VM windows.

The normal thing to do in this situation is make the larger external display primary when it is connected. Then things open on that monitor, with proper scaling, well most things, not VB stuff. For some reason I cannot fathom, if I set the non-scaled larger sized (but smaller resolution) display as primary, the VB manager window is scaled very wonky when it opens. It is as if VBox somehow tries to apply the scaling from the native display, and applies it, even when the window is opened directly to the external non-scaled display. it's VERY bad. If the bug system will let me, I will try to attach some screenshots of this.

[Chuck vdL]

screen shot of VM mgr and two other windows, as inititally opened on a laptop with 4K display.

[Chuck vdL]

same three windows, moved to 2.5K -100% display, notice how chrome and file manager properly resize, but VM MGR is still upscaled, and just horrid. (saved at reduced resolution to get under 512K )

[Chuck vdL]

closed vmmgr, set external display to primary, and re-opened to this horrid scaling. only vbox does this! (saved at reduced scale to get under file size limits)

[Chuck vdL]

the VM mgr window was opened on 2.5k, moved to 4K, then back, now takes over entire screen.. this is so magically horrid I'd love to give you a video, but it would be way too big to upload