Can't arrange two monitors the right way when only one has scaling

I have Windows 10 installed on a 2017 iMac. I've connected a second monitor to it that is not retina resolution. When both displays are set to a scale of 1.0 the "select and arrange displays" section looks like this:



That's reasonable, as the resolution of the first monitor is much bigger than the second. However, the second monitor is physically only a few inches shorter than the iMac's monitor. So I set the scale on the iMac monitor to 2.5, which makes it so that elements between both monitors are about the same size.

However, after I did that, the "select and arrange displays" section still looks like this:




It didn't change! The second display should only be a little bit shorter than the first now. This makes it very awkward for me to move the cursor from one display to the other. I have to move the cursor into the lower right corner, and then it appears in a totally incongruous spot on the second display. It's very annoying!

Is there any way to fix this?

CountMike said:

Hi, that's up to GPU drivers and monitor EDID Extended Display Identification Data - Wikipedia only if both are recognized by each other can Windows know their sizes and positions.

I'm a bit confused as to why this is important. When arranging two or more displays, windows bases their relative size solely on their resolution. It doesn't seem to use any extra information provided by the graphics driver or the monitor's EDID (such as its physical dimensions).

The problem seems to be that when you turn on scaling, Windows will keep using the monitors' physical resolution when determining their relative size, even though the logical portion of the screen they now occupy is not determined by the resolution anymore. Basically, if I set one monitor to scale by 2.5, then its rectangle in the arrange area should be 2.5x smaller, or 40% of its original size.

This is something both macOS and Linux do automatically... but not Windows? Surely there's a way to fix this!

At the suggestion of someone from Microsoft's forum, I tried uninstalling my graphics driver and trying it with the default Windows graphics driver for my graphics card, but it has the same issue.