SOLVED: Why Text on a Windows 11 Computers Look Better Than It Did Previously

We have a client looking at replacing all of their 1920×1080 (aka HD) screens with 2560×1440 (aka QHD) screens and they were concerned that staff would see fuzzy text if they scaled the resolution. The idea being that, the extra pixels on the same physical size screen would the text smaller, so staff might zoom in using scaling of 125% to make the text the same physical size as it is on 1920×1080 screens.

We explained that fonts and graphics are no longer 1:1 on almost any screen so all text is now DRAWN on the screen and not simply, displayed as it was created.

Fonts are now defined by mathematical paths and curves (vectors), not by a grid of pixels.

Windows XP was the last Windows operating system that just pushed text (as a graphic) to the screen. If you were using a high resolution screen with Windows XP and decided to set scaling to say 300%, fonts would look terrible. See the graphic above for an example.

Contrast this with Windows 11 font scaling; it does not just zoom the pixels in to make them larger. It uses vectors (lines) to create text by drawing each character.

If you are still not understanding the concept, think of it like this:

• Old-fashioned “scaling up” (like stretching a small image): Imagine you have a tiny JPG image of text. If you blow it up to 200%, the pixels just get bigger, and the text becomes blocky and blurry. This is not how Windows 11 scaling works for most things
• Modern High-DPI scaling: Imagine you have a vector graphic of text (like in Adobe Illustrator). You can make it as big or as small as you want, and it will always render perfectly sharply, because the underlying data is resolution-independent. Windows 11’s scaling tries to emulate this as much as possible for text and UI

Is Scaling A High Resolution Monitor Clearer Than Using Lower Resolution Without Scaling?

In a word, yes, because a QHD monitor has 78% more pixels than a 1080 monitor.

• 1080 (1920×1080): Has approximately 2 million pixels
• QHD (2560×1440): Has approximately 3.7 million pixels

Lets take an example of a common 27″ monitor to calculate how many pixels are on squeezed into every inch of the screen:

• 1080p (27-inch): Around 81 PPI. At this size, individual pixels can be quite visible, and text can appear a bit “soft” or “pixelated” for some users, especially if they sit close to the screen
• QHD (27-inch): Around 109 PPI. This is a significant jump in pixel density. Pixels are much smaller and closer together

On Windows 11 and modern applications, a QHD monitor scaled to 125% will deliver a significantly sharper and clearer text experience compared to a 1080p monitor at 100% scaling, because it’s leveraging the much higher pixel density to render the text with finer detail. The “scaling” isn’t a simple blow-up; it’s an intelligent re-rendering.

What is ClearType?

A pixel is a single dot on a screen, but each pixel is composed of 3 smaller dots, called sub-pixels. There is a red green and blue sub-pixel for every dot you see on the screen. Microsoft developed ClearType to massively enhance the display of fonts, by only turning on and setting the intensity of some of the 3 subpixels along the edge of a letter.

By subtly adjusting the color and intensity of these subpixels, ClearType “smoothes” the edges of fonts, making them appear sharper, more rounded, and more natural, similar to how anti-aliasing works in graphics rendering. This makes text easier on the eyes, especially during long reading sessions.

History of Font Scaling

Here’s a simplified timeline of key developments:

• Windows XP and Earlier: These versions primarily used simple pixel-based scaling (GDI scaling). If you increased the DPI setting, Windows would essentially just stretch the existing pixels, leading to blurriness, especially on higher-resolution monitors. Old applications that weren’t “DPI-aware” would look very bad.
• Windows Vista (2006): This was a significant turning point. Vista introduced DPI virtualization and the Desktop Window Manager (DWM)
  • DWM: This compositing engine allowed for individual application windows to be rendered off-screen at a native resolution and then scaled by the DWM before being displayed. This was a crucial step towards smoother scaling
  • DPI Virtualization: For applications that were not DPI-aware, Vista would essentially tell them they were running at 96 DPI (100% scale), and then the DWM would scale the resulting application window. This improved things slightly over XP, but these “virtualized” apps could still look blurry
  • DPI-Awareness Manifests: Developers could start declaring their applications as “DPI-aware” in a manifest file, allowing Windows to render them correctly at higher DPI settings without virtualization
• Windows 7 (2009): Continued to refine Vista’s DPI scaling and DWM
• Windows 8.1 (2013): This was another very important milestone for high-DPI displays
  • It introduced per-monitor DPI scaling. This meant that if you had multiple monitors with different pixel densities (e.g., a high-res laptop screen and a lower-res external monitor), Windows could apply different scaling levels to each, and applications would (ideally) scale correctly when dragged between them
  • The “global setting to disable DPI virtualization (only use XP-style scaling)” was removed, pushing developers to adopt DPI-aware practices
• Windows 10 (2015) & Anniversary Update (Version 1607, 2016):
  • Further investments were made to make the desktop UI itself (taskbar, File Explorer, icons, context menus) scale crisply
  • Version 1703 (Creators Update) even brought back a “System (Enhanced)” compatibility option for some older apps, which was a better version of the old GDI pixel scaling for those legacy programs
  • Modern Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps (which are built from the ground up for the Windows 10/11 ecosystem) are designed to be fully resolution-independent and scale perfectly
• Windows 11 (2021): Continues to build on the advancements of Windows 10, with an even greater emphasis on modern UI elements that are natively designed for high-DPI and vector-based rendering. While legacy apps can still present challenges, the core OS and modern applications fully leverage resolution-independent scaling

In summary, there isn’t a single “last version” that solely used pixel scaling. Windows began its transition to more intelligent, vector-aware scaling with Windows Vista, and this has been progressively improved and refined through Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and now Windows 11.