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lv-anoll's avatar
lv-anoll
New Contributor
2 years ago

Best practices when working with 4K screens and HighDPI

Hi community,

we use the TestComplete desktop edition to test our Win64/Qt/MSVC application under Windows10/11. Our software runs ideally on FullHD and 4K screens. 4K is more or less already the standard for our customer base. Therefore we would like to carry out the tests with a 4K resolution and appropriate scaling (e.g. 150% or 200%) to be as near as possible to the setup that our customers are working with later on.

But at the moment this is not possible for us: We've learned that TestComplete works best only with a 100% scaling, but on a 4K screen this is not useable when developping new tests. Therefore we opted for ultra wide screen displays with 3440x1440px and 100% scaling. We also started using TestExecute within our Jenkins infrastructure and got another problem: The 3440x1440px resolution is not supported by the TestExecute plugin and Smartbear told us that they won't add it.

We are kind of stuck and unsure how to continue: For (our plenty) tests with image comparison we need to stick to one resolution/scaling for both the development and test worker machines. We need to balance the requirements for developping tests (ergonomics/readability for testers - 100% scaling on 4K hurts the eyes) and TestExecute (restriced resolutions). And ideally we want to be able to use 4K screens with >100% scaling to overcome the workaround with our current screens.

We can't imagine that we're the only ones with these questions and problems. So any shared experience or recommendations from other users is highly appreciated.

3 Replies

  • rraghvani's avatar
    rraghvani
    Champion Level 3

    Why is it not possible to test at 100% scaling and a lower resolution? Do you have any test scenarios that require higher scaling and resolution? Are you comparing any images?

    • lv-anoll's avatar
      lv-anoll
      New Contributor

      Our software is a scientific imaging software. We have a lot of tests that verify the correct rendering of images. As our default/recommended resolution is 4K and a scaling >100% we would like to test as near as possible to the end user's usage scenario.

  • rraghvani's avatar
    rraghvani
    Champion Level 3

    Understood. Unfortunately, TC will not behave correctly if scaling is not 100%.