Talk: Fractional display scaling in Workstation makes some apps/games blurry or incorrectly sized

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

This is a discussion topic for the following Common Issue:

Fractional display scaling in Workstation makes some apps/games blurry or incorrectly sized

Problem In Fedora 41 Workstation, games and old applications (which don’t support Wayland natively) may appear blurry or be incorrectly sized, if you use display scaling above 100%. There also might be performance degradation. Note: Display scaling might be enabled automatically – that depends on what particular display you have. Cause Display scaling is the process of making everything (application windows, texts, etc) bigger on your screen. It’s often used for modern high-density displays…

You can discuss the problem and its solutions here, but please note that debugging and technical feedback should primarily go to the issue trackers (e.g. Bugzilla) linked in the Common Issue, because that’s the place that developers watch, not here.

If there are any updates/changes/amendments for the Common Issue description, which you believe should be performed, please post it here.

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

Please see the Common Issue for solution/workarounds:

Fractional display scaling in Workstation makes some apps/games blurry or incorrectly sized

Problem In Fedora 41 Workstation, games and old applications (which don’t support Wayland natively) may appear blurry or be incorrectly sized, if you use display scaling above 100%. There also might be performance degradation. Note: Display scaling might be enabled automatically – that depends on what particular display you have. Cause Display scaling is the process of making everything (application windows, texts, etc) bigger on your screen. It’s often used for modern high-density displays…

[decathorpe (Fabio Valentini)]

@Fractional display scaling in Workstation makes some apps/games blurry or incorrectly sized

Problem In Fedora 41 Workstation, games and old applications (which don’t support Wayland natively) may appear blurry or be incorrectly sized, if you use display scaling above 100%.

This was the case with the old Implementation of fractional scaling on Fedora 40 / GNOME 46, but isn’t really true anymore with the new default implementation in Fedora 41 / GNOME 47. Nothing should be blurry. The only things that can happen, as far as I know, are:

• some apps that don’t scale themselves (like steam) will appear a bit too small (but not blurry)
• Fullscreen applications like games that use XWayland will see a “wrong” display resolution. for example, if you use 150% scaling and have a 4K screen, the game will see a resolution of 6K. as far as I can tell, setting resolution to the “native” one in-game does what it’s supposed to, though.

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

Thanks, @decathorpe. So can I remove all references to blurry apps, including the workarounds mentioned for Chrome/Electron/etc? And only keep notes about wrong sizing?

Regarding games, there’s a bug describing a blurry game here, even when the resolution is set to native. There might be a slight complication that modern games often use “render scale” instead of changing the resolution, which wouldn’t yield a sharp image (and the users might not understand the distinction). However, the user in that bug report clearly states to have set a native resolution in game settings. So at least for games, it looks like there’s still some issue to be handled.

I should be able to test some games myself towards the end of the week, and then I’ll have some personal experience.

[qvest (Ian Meyer)]

I’ve tested the beta for workstation 41 a couple days ago. With everything else set as default, it still happens when I set scaling to 125% (Installing Obsidianmd flatpak version and launching it as is. When forcing the app to run on Wayland through Flatseal it scales as expected).

Just reporting my experience in a live environment on the Beta for Fedora workstation 41. Will test again just in case something has changed

[decathorpe (Fabio Valentini)]

So can I remove all references to blurry apps, including the workarounds mentioned for Chrome/Electron/etc?

I think so. I’ve been using F41 Workstation with the experimental fractional scaling enabled (set to 150%) for a few weeks now and I’ve not seen a single XWayland application that was “blurry”:

• Steam: doesn’t scale, UI is a bit small (but not blurry)
• VS Code (Electron): scales correctly
• Google Chrome: scales correctly
• JetBrains IDEs: scale correctly
• fullscreen games: working and looking fine to me

(It’s possible that blurriness issues now only happen for some apps on “odd” scaling factors like 125%, but not 150%, I haven’t tested scaling factors other than 150%.)

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

@qvest

I’ve tested the beta for workstation 41 a couple days ago.

We just released F41 Final, please try again and report back, thanks. An important piece was missing at Beta, it should work differently now.

[qvest (Ian Meyer)]

Can confirm it is working now, I’ve just tested Obsidian though, an electron app. Scaling 125%

[manual (Aniket Mujumdar)]

So there are some good pointers for common problems in the post above, currently I’m facing two issues

Monitor Details

I have a multi monitor setup with the primary display being a 27 inch monitor and the other being a 15.4 inch laptop display. I have 100% scaling on the primary and 125% on the laptop display.

Issues

1. So with gnome 47 XWayland apps are no longer blurry, but the steam flatpak doesn’t seem to use the correct size, it renders at 100% on my laptop and 75% on my primary, meaning it’s too small on both displays. This was solved by unplugging and replugging the display as suggested but is a major problem.
2. The weird mixed fractional scaling bug where the app grid has weird rendering of the app names that is described here which isn’t yet resolved in gnome 47.

[wiking5 (Wiking)]

Use increments of 25% (e.g. 125%, 150, 175, 200, 225%).

[tomengland (Thomas England)]

Can confirm, did nothing special, set scaling to 150%, vscode is tacksharp, chrome is tacksharp, not sure what is going on in the backend to make it work but it looks great!

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

I’ve updated the common issue description - removed references to app blurriness, tried to incorporate additional advice. Feedback is welcome.

@manual

So with gnome 47 XWayland apps are no longer blurry, but the steam flatpak doesn’t seem to use the correct size, it renders at 100% on my laptop and 75% on my primary, meaning it’s too small on both displays. This was solved by unplugging and replugging the display as suggested but is a major problem.

If you mean that you need to unplug one of the displays to make Steam appear correctly, then it’s the same problem that I saw. Could you please look whether this issue is already reported in mutter, and if not, report it and link it here? I’ve been meaning to do it myself, but couldn’t find the time yet. Thanks a lot.

[skarp (Tukas Armanis)]

webcord blurry unusable cammon 2024 still issues? dissapointing

[dunkelbalu (Isno Gud)]

I just updated to F41 and some apps are now blurry with the same setting of 200% display scaling. OnlyOffice (Flathub) for example has in-app scaling and was fine with manual adjustment in-app before the update. With F41’s system-wide fractional scaling its now blurry.

Just tried the release from the Fusion repo instead of Falthub. Same result.

Any idea how to fix that?

EDIT: Nvm, the experimental feature wasn’t active.
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer', 'xwayland-native-scaling']
Works well now!

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

Actually, this is a good remark. If you touched “org.gnome.mutter experimental-features” before, you’ll not inherit the new default. I’ll try to add a note into the issue description somewhere.

[gog077 (Gauthier Andre)]

I had troubles running steam games on my second screen with F41. My latop screen is scaling at 200% and external is 100%. Steam UI scaled correctly on external screen but the games themselves where scaled at 200% so only a quarter was showing on external screen.

I disabled the experimental features and now this problem is fixed, but now some of my apps (Electron apps like VSCode) don’t scale correctly anymore on my laptop screen. I did not have this behavior on F40.

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

@gog077

Steam UI scaled correctly on external screen but the games themselves where scaled at 200% so only a quarter was showing on external screen.

You can please report this against mutter and link it here? I would add it to the common issue description. Thanks!

[gog077 (Gauthier Andre)]

I explained my case on this issue as it was very similar : Scaling applied to applications on wrong monitor (#3757) · Issues · GNOME / mutter · GitLab

[ykpcx (Zhaobin Huang)]

I think the most important issue is the font. The font is blurry on gtk apps, and this is because gtk only natively supports integer scaling, so gtk apps render at integer scale then downscale. Fonts on Firefox, on the other hand, look sharp.

[EDIT] I’ve just found the related issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3407, and it seems if you choose the right scale factor it make the logical dimensions integer, the blurriness disappears. For example in my case, I have a 2800x1800 laptop, if I set the scale factor to 1.75, it blurs. but for 1.8, everything looks sharp.

Games, on the other hand, might render in a higher-than-needed resolution, causing a heavy performance penalty and potentially some bluriness. This happens even if you set the scale value to integer numbers, like 200% or 300% (because the underlying scale method is still fractional).

I think integer scaling is fine, because the resolution the game “sees” is actually the native resolution(at least for xwayland).