No Retina Support in Mac Client?

As a test, I'm running Windows 10 on my Retina MacBook Pro using Parallels Desktop, and the display is using "Hi-DPI" that matches the Retina display. Both are fully up-to-date as of August 26.

When I go on the Mac side and try to remote to the Windows side, here's what I see:

The mouse cursor is twice as big as expected.
Dragging items with the mouse moves twice faster than normal mouse movement. Dragging windows becomes difficult.
The display is fuzzy, not the one-to-one pixel match I expected when GoToMyPC runs in full screen.
If you use the option to let the host adjust the client display, the windows are too big.

Some screenshots to compare:

Original: https://1drv.ms/i/s!Ah9Uh_PgbeBzx2Inc7FziFpAPC6P
GoToMyPC Mac Client: https://1drv.ms/i/s!Ah9Uh_PgbeBzx2HXdxyR7wKHWe4J
Same, with host adjusting for the client display: https://1drv.ms/i/s!Ah9Uh_PgbeBzx2C45zj8wg1y4MgA

Since my Windows is always running in Hi-DPI mode, and I always use Macs to connect to it, I think I'll have to drop GoToMyPC and look for another solution.

BTW, just noticed customers have been asking for this for the past 4 years. Seems like the Mac client wasn't updated since. For such an expensive product, that doesn't look well.

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Comments

Benoit Nadeau

Hi-DPI is a monitor setting in Windows 8 and higher that impacts _ALL_ GUI elements. In Windows 7 and before, it impacts only the icon size and text, but in Windows 8 and higher, everything on screen is scaled. In Windows 10, go to Settings, Display and you'll see "Change the size of text, apps and other items" (notice the wording, compared to Windows 7). If you buy any modern Windows 10 laptop with a Hi-DPI display, the display monitor driver will automatically set this for you to higher than 100%. Retina Mac displays are the equivalent of "200%".

All the tests were done on the exact same physical display of my 15" MacBook Pro.

I tried both viewer settings, as you can see in my screenshots. The second screenshot, based to "scale-to-fit", is a clear example of a Windows software that doesn't honour the Windows' display DPI settings when taking images from the display "frame buffer".

The "story" seems to be the following:

The Mac client doesn't support Retina, so when it asks for Mac OS' screen resolution, it gets 1440 x 900 at normal DPI rather than 2880 x 1800 at Hi-DPI.
The Mac client then:
a) If "actual size", asks the size from the Windows server. Since the Windows server doesn't support Hi DPI too, it returns a full-blown 2880 x 1800 display. The Mac client then resizes that to 1440 x 900 (because it doesn't know what Hi DPI is), and Mac OS then blows that up to 2880 x 1800, giving a blurry image, and a complete waste of transferring all those 2880 x 1800 pixels from the Windows Server.
b) If "scale-to-fit" is used, asks to the Windows server to resize the display to 1440 x 900. Since the Windows server doesn't take into account the client side's DPI, it resizes the display to that using Hi-DPI. When sent back to the Mac, that "effective" 720 x 450 (UI elements 200% on 1400 x 900 pixels) display is now blown up to 1400 x 900, which is then blown up twice to the display 2800 x 1800.
In both cases, the dumb Windows server sends the mouse image at Hi-DPI with no DPI information, and the Mac side displays it twice as big as the original.
In both cases, the "relative mouse movements" used when dragging uses the Mac "fake" 1440 x 900, but tracks on the native 2880 x 1800, so it sends effectively twice the mouse speed to the Windows server. Dragging anything is unusable.

So, this is an absolute, total mess.

Hi-DPI displays have been in use (at 2x) on the Mac side since mid 2012, and on PCs (at minimum 1.5x) since late 2012. It is now standard almost all Macs and >$700 PC laptops. It is also standard on every single iOS and Android phone or tablet. Native, across-the-board OS support for UI scaling has been fully supported on all computing platforms (Mac, Windows 8.1+, iOS, Android 4+, Linux GTK and QT) since 2013.

It doesn't help that of the half-dozen remote desktop software I tried in the past week, _ALL_ of them supported Hi-DPI across the board, expect yours.

Michael16

Hi Benoit, is the hi-DPI mode you are referring to the DPI scaling for icons and text from within Windows' resolution settings? I know that when connecting Windows clients to Windows hosts will result in weird graphics glitches; does your Mac have an equivalent scale to adjust?

Also, what are your viewer settings configured to? Are you using "Actual size" instead of "scale-to-fit"? In your Preferences under the Performance tab, are you adjusted to use true color?

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