SOLIDWORKS Display Scaling Solutions

Are you seeing duplication (see Figure 1) of your SOLIDWORKS graphical screen or dialogs where you cannot see all the text on your external (typically 4K) monitor?

Figure 1: Screen Duplication Example

What is happening?

If you are running Windows 7 or higher, with a high-density (4K+) external display, the operating system may automatically adjust the scaling setting for the display being used. Users typically want to modify this setting, as they may want the windows user interface to appear smaller or larger. This is especially true for Desktop Icons labels.

The DPI scaling is set globally within the operating system via Windows Control Panel | Appearance and Personalization | Display.
This global setting can have an undesired effect on certain applications, leading to “fuzzy” fonts and other behaviors on applications that do not recognize this setting. Whether or not SOLIDWORKS is affected depends on your combination of graphics card and driver, so not 100% of all users will experience this issue.

How do we fix this?

Option #1

Step #1

Step #2

Step #3

 

Step #4

In the Properties dialog, select the Compatibility tab. Then select the button “Change Settings for all Users” (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Property Dialog of sldworks.exe

 

Step #5

In the dialog for all users, check the box labeled “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Compatibility dialog for all users

Step #6

Click OK for both dialogs, then close all applications and restart the system to check and see if the settings change has resolved the issue.

Option #2

You can also fix this issue by changing the Display scaling to be less than 125% (Figure 5).