I just updated KiCAD to the official 5.1.2 release from the arch repositories (https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/kicad/). I am using a surface pro 4 running Arch Linux (GNOME) which has a very hdpi screen, so I use a display scaling of 200%. However when using KiCAD now the accelerated toolset is broken and renders all of the contents of eescheema and pcbnew only in the bottom left quarter of the screen. The rest of the screen stays black.
When switching to the fallback toolset the rendering works fine. I can confirm that setting the display scaling to 100% works too, but this does not work for me because everything gets to small to read.
Yeah, already figured that. But that’s unusable for me because the text and buttons get to small. The surface pro 4 also has this weird aspect ration of 3:2 and just one possible resolution (2736x1824) with this ratio. everything else like 16:9, 16:10 or 4:3 will give me black bars.
Maybe it’s just me, but what use are all those pixels if the’re so small that you can’t see them?
I’m also saving money for a 4k monitor, but a simple calculation tells me the minimum diagonal for such a thing to be usefull is around 90cm.
(temprary?) solution, put your monitor in a lower resolution
Maybe I’m just jealous.
Yes, KiCad gained explicit HiDPI support, so it requests the true scaling factor from the OS and turns off the compatibility mode. If only the latter works, you end up with the symptoms you describe.
You can override the autodetected scaling factor in the preferences dialog.
Wow that works! Turning off automatic scaling and setting it to 2 makes the accelerated toolset usable again.
I will try tomorrow if this affects displaying KiCAD on my 2nd monitor connected to the docking station which unfortunately is just a 24" FHD Display and uses no scaling.
I just tried this setting on my FHD Display without scaling. While the rendering is fine, the mouse position is not translated correctly. If I click in the middle of the screen, the program recognizes the click more to the to right.
I dunno. Any of the antialiasing modes offered by the OpenGL canvas look bad to me, I have tried several times and have to stick with no antialiasing (2x 1920x 1200, 61cm/24" diag) as I cant stand any of the interpolation methods.
Using a higher res display with no antialiasing might solve that problem, no?
Solve what problem?
I never bothered to mess with antialiasing, with one slight exception:
I’ve been turning anti alasing for text off for years. I found the fuzzyness of text edges generated by anti aliasing much more irritating then sligtly jagged edges.
But then, I grew up in the age of dot matrix printers.
A monitor with a diagonal of 90cm is about the max that fits on my desk, and should also be enough. 4K resolution is perfect for that. Only then I will start about thinking about making pixels smaller for that “little bit of extra shine”. So maybe I’ll buy an 8K monitor in 10 years time.
I do agree that much more and smaller pixels “look better”, but they are not really usefull. If your monitor has twice the resolution, but is so small that you make text and icons 2x bigger, the only difference is that it looks better with no added usability. It’s just a marketing trick to get peoply to buy more expensive stuff.
(Correction: Some people find a “beautiful” monitor important. I don’t. For me it’s all about functionality, and 0.27mm is a pretty good size for a functional pixel. 0.23 is about the mininum size for a functional pixel (on a desktop monitor))
Antialiasing in KiCad looks horribly wrong. Anti aliasing should be a sub-pixel setting and screenshots I’ve seen look like it’s smeared out over areas of 100 pixel wide or so.
I managed to work around the issue by setting Preferences > Common > User Interface > Canvas Scale to 2.0 (and disabling the Automatic checkbox).
I am on GNOME 3 + Wayland + Arch Linux on KiCad 5.1.2, and KiCad 5.1.0 worked fine for me, so it’s likely that something broke between 5.1.0 and 5.1.2. My display settings are set to 200% scale.
