Blurry text on secondary monitor in multi-resolution, multi-DPI setup

KACI said:

You might try connecting your secondary monitor to you internal graphics. I run 3 monitors, all different makes. I connect 2 of them to my 970 and one to my internal and it works fine. That way your 970 can use all its resources on the 4K monitor and the internal is plenty enough for you 1080.

You might also check and see if you have surround turned on. Let each monitor get its own signal instead of spreading it across both of them. Just an idea.

KACI - how do you force the dedicated NVIDIA card for the external displays? My NVIDIA Control Panel (for the 960m) does not seem to have an option for proscribing the card to use with the displays (integrated or discrete). In fact, even if I switch the global setting to "Use NVIDIA High Performance Graphics," the graphics card rarely even turns on let alone power my displays. It used to be so simple on my mac using "GFX Switcher," but with the behavior I have seen on Windows it almost seems pointless to have it. I have a Dell XPS 15 9550.

Appreciate any input you could have to help!

I personally don't use a laptop so I'm not much help I'm afraid. My understanding is that the systems automatically switch to the high performance chips as needed. All part of the power management process.

I have found new information about this issue. On the Windows 10 Insider Hub are detailed information about the Display scaling methods (PDF download: Microsoft OneDrive - Access files anywhere. Create docs with free Office Online.). It seems, that apps like Office 2016, Firefox, Skype, etc. are "System scale factor" apps and can only scale correct on the primary display. We have to wait until Microsoft and the Software developer fix this issue.

​Hi, i am having the same issue here. I set my 1080P monitor as my main monitor, and 4K monitor as a second monitor.
Only Edge works fine when you dragged from 1080P monitor to 4K monitor. It looks super sharp on both monitors.
But when I drag a word document from 1080P to 4K to edit, it looks so blurry. Not only the contents in the word document itself, but the word application itself becomes blurry. Chrome has the same issue like you said. I noticed another issue, when you try to use some third party tools to capture a picture, it cannot keep my open stuff at their original location, everything becomes shifted. It is so annoying that win 10 still cannot fix this issue.

I tested on my Mac running 10.9.5 and everything works perfectly. With Chrome, Word, any software works like it should be when you drag around from this display to another display. I mean, OSX 10.9.5 is like two years earlier OS than win 10, but can handle the 1080P and 4K monitors perfectly. After all, M$ is still not as good as Apple. Anybody find a solution how to deal with the 1080P and 4K monitors issue on Win10? Please let us know, we appreciate it. :)

Same problem bro!!
On ATI R9 380.

Dell 27" 4K with mini DP/DP and Dell 24" FH with dvi/hdmi adaptor.

With standard resolution, everything ok, but on 27" text and icon are too small.. if change to 150%, on 27" is ok.. but on second screen everything is blurry!!

How to fix that??

There is hope. I was having this problem with Firefox and so I logged an issue with Mozilla. The stable version of the browser (v44 at the time), on my secondary display was incredibly blurry. I noticed that on Firefox Developer Edition (some alpha version of v46 at the time) had really nice rendering on the same screen, so I started using it as my main browser. After a few updates to the developer edition, it went back to being blurry, just like stable version. I was sad.

What had happened is that a fix that had made v46 do a great job of displaying sharp text on the secondary display was backed out since it had some impact on other things. When I inquired, I was told that a release-ready fix would be in Firefox v47 which, at the time, was the Nightly version. It was suggested that I use that if I was so concerned with font rendering and that it really wasn't as unstable as the Nightly name implied. I've been using that for a couple of months now (Nightly is on v48 currently) and haven't really had any significant issues while enjoying greatly improved rendering.

So, the point of this story is that it is possible for apps to render sharply across displays with different DPI. Maybe MS could have a look over the Mozilla code to see how they're handling things in Firefox v47+, though it surprises me that they don't already know how to do this.

Here's the Mozilla issue - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=890156

I have this same issue, and all my monitors use the same display default display scaling, and all monitors have the same native resolution, which is also set to the default. I have tried many fixes, including all of those listed above (except I replaced my entire brand-new computer, rather than replacing the video card).

This issue is still present. I'm using on a 2k laptop with a 1080p display. What I did is to turn them both to 100%, logout, log back in and then my laptop's screen to 150%. Seems to be a good enough fix for the moment. However, this shouldn't be a problem in the first place!

It's 2021 now, and I am still having the same issue. Any fix?