Anyone using Unity Editor on 4K monitor (28 - 32 inch)

Hi,

So my primary monitor's PSU died a couple of months ago and i'm still chasing up a replacement. Then a few days ago my back up monitor started to lose sync with the PC's when turned off (or PC set to sleep mode). It now takes 15 mins of button pushing to randomly get the monitor to sync to the output of the PC.

This all means looking for a new monitor and so naturally I'm considering going 4K since my client work with Unity is based around HD or higher output it would be a great boon to have the game window at the correct resolution whilst having plenty of space left around it for the inspector etc.

I've searched around but can't find any decent threads about dev's using Unity editor on 4k monitors (not laptops, 28-32 inch screens) so i'm unaware as to whether there are any issues with using such a high dpi screen. The last thing I want is for the Editor text to be so small that I can't read it. I beleive that win 8.1 can help in terms of increasing font size but unsure if that works in Unity?

So anyone using Unity editor with a 4K monitor/ What is your experience with it? Is it usable in terms of being able to comfortably read the text in the inspector? Anything else to be aware of?

Thanks.

 

The dev next to me is using one. It's a pretty awesome really. He can have sooo many panels open. I use Cintiq, so I don't get to use a 4k monitor. But, yea, no problems we noticed.

 

I don't use 4k (Mainly because my PC can't handle it.) but I can amagin what it must look like! So much working space!

 

It's really a benefit for UI stuff, as you can have your game window open large enough for the canvas to be full size.

 

That sounds awesome, I gotta get my one someday

 

Thanks for the reply. My main concern is the the Unity text (e.g. inspector) is just going to be tiny and to hard to read. My eye sight is not getting better as I get older so really don't want to risk it further. Is your collegue just using Unity straight up on the 4K display or have they adjusted OS font scaling or something?

Cintiq looks cool, and expensive, no wonder you don't have a 4k monitor

 

I do recommend it though bro, it can be such a life saver some times

 

Nope, as is. While the text is smaller, the monitor is big (32 I think). So it practically is about the same. Just a lot more real estate.

 

Again thanks for the prompt reply.

Though I trust you i'm not sure I believe it even on a 32" screen

Any chance of a photo of the monitor with the inspector up - can be default empty scene inspector on camera or something, just to gauge the relative size of text to screen?

Also out of interest what make/model is it?

 

You can always set the monitor to a lower res, although It might make things very blurry.

 

Thanks but that completely defeats the purpose of buying 4k in the first place.

For my client work I could really do with having the game window at the target resolution (e.g. 1920x1080 or even 1080x1920 in some cases). 4K will allow that and have plenty of room for inspector and other panels around it. My concern is that since Unity doesn't support changing the editor font size ( AFAIK ) on a 4k monitor text in the inspector will become tiny and uncomfortable to read.

 

Okay here's why I would suggest, you don't have to do this but I see this the best for you'r purposes

get a 1080 screen for coding and making the game, get a 4K screen for game play,

So you can see what you'r doing while making the game, and then you got a nice BIG screen for testing!

 

I'm considering the Philips BDM4065UC for when (or if) I have some money, which is a 40 inch 4K monitor, meaning it has a similar pixel density to a 27 inch 2560x1440 monitor, so the text will be a reasonable size. It seems a good choice for Unity development.

There is also a Seiki 40" monitor on the way (first model will be HDMI 1.4 and DisplayPort 1.2, but a second version a couple of months later with HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.3, so 60Hz possible with both ports, not just DP).

 

Then I have two monitors when I just want one 4k one. Again thanks for the help but I already have these solutions and they are no longer useful to me. My previous monitor was 2560x1440 and that was pretty good, but if i need to buy a new one might as well go 4k.

 

Bro! I seen that! looks like a good monitor.

 

what ever is best for you

 

Thanks for the input. Yeah 40" is probably a bit too big. Would like to stick to 28 or at a push 32. Interesting about the pixel density. Its been a couple of months since using the 2560x1440 monitor and I can't remember if the font size on that was already giving me problems or not. Also not sure if I tried win 8.,1 font scaling on it or if it had an effect in Unity.

Really all I need is for Unity to support font scaling for its editor interface and everything would be peachy, but thats been requested for the 4-5 years and we still don't have it.

Edit: Checked out the BDM4065UC, looks interesting but as a VA panel that is a deal breaker to me. Looking for IPS or PLS myself.

 

I plan on getting two of these
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/acer-monitor-umhb0aaa01

It's solid, you can change it from landscape to portrait of you can,

But I really like this one cause I got them side by side one screen for editing, one screen for playing

 

Bear in mind, my direct comparison is to a 15 non retina laptop. Comparing it to say a higher resolution 24 monitor may have a significant difference. It's a dell. Sorry picture/screen shot is not possible.

I will say that I am of the age where my vision isn't what it used to be, and It poses no problems for me.

 

Just a tip, if you have win8, you can take a screen shot by
Windows Key + Screen Print key

 

Heh... that isn't the issue. The issue is that my studio is mid-core Marvel/StarWars. At this particular moment in time, sharing any imagery from in the office would pretty much cost me my job (at least).

(and I don't do windows)

 

oh okay no problem.

 

It's

Are you trying to warn us that Darth Vadar is real and will kill you?!?

 

Darth Vader is dead... it's the new threat that is a concern...

 

New? Or Very Very Old?

 

@Noisecrime
I have an iMac 27", with 2560 x 1440 resolution. Unity looks good in it. Sometimes, i feel inspector fonts small.
So, i can zoom the screen instantly with cmd + scroll up.
I think, windows don't have this functionality to zoom.
correct me if i am wrong.

 

Technically the lure of the Dark side is very old. But the practitioners may be 'generational', so to speak.

 

Wait, so is the text still pixelated on the retina MacBook pros? I thought this was being fixed in unity 5?

 

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah my main monitor that is currently down due to blown PSU is a 2560x1440 and I don't remember the text being a huge problem, but it was definitely smaller. Though I do remember in browsers increasing the font size to make text more comfortable to read.

The problem is i'm now talking about jumping to 3840x2160, so in vertical that's 30% extra pixels in roughly the same physical space, so the font size will look 30% smaller? In which case that is going to be a big issue.

At the moment i'm hoping I can get a replacement PSU for my main monitor and avoid having to buy a new one as i'm just not convinced or comfortable about taking the jump to 4K with Unity unless it supports dynamic font scaling for its interface. For one thing i'm not prepared to risk my aging eye-sight, for another it seems like a bad time to buy as several new technologies are coming on stream (faster refresh rates (e.g. 120-144HZ) , G-Sync, Free-Sync etc) and the longer I can hold off the better and cheaper I can get a monitor with these features.

Having said that I am trying to investigate a possible workaround using DisplayFusion, that I believe allows you to set up multiple split virtual desktops on a single monitor. This may mean I can set up a 1920x2160 or even 2560x2160 virtual desktop and then what ever is left as a second virtual desktop and have the smaller one set to a lower resolution than the actual pixel dimensions it covers. Hopefully that will mean I can keep the game/scene and other no font size dependent Unity panels in the large desktop and things like inspector panels in the smaller one. With the smaller virtual desktop using a lower resolution all the text will appear bigger, essentially the same thing as if you reduced your native resolution on your monitor.

 

I'm also keeping one eye in the market for a 4K monitor. Gsync looks useful. It adds $200 to the price of any monitor but is something we certainly want to be testing on given our customer profile.

I too have concerns about a 28" being a little too small to read now I'm 40, but the price hike when moving to 32" is exponential. I'm waiting for a more affordable 32" gloss finish IPS 4K Gsync monitor with DP and HDMI 2.0 ports for future proofing, to replace 3 x 1080p monitors. At the moment the only 4K gsync monitor on the market is the Acer, and that only has DP and is a TN panel.

 

I have a 28" 4k monitor on Windows. After 6 month I consider it a bad investment. 28" is way too small for that resolution.
With Window 8.1 you have a rescale feature that works well but you get a lot of compatibility problem with Games and some apps, and in the end you you get the same screen space as a 1440p monitor.

Also Gsync only works in full screen mode.

 

Hi.
Unity 5 now does in fact run in high resolution. The problem is that, as mentioned in this thread, the text is now so small its unreadable. I would far-far-far more like it to double the pixels as it always has until font scaling is sorted out. I'm forced to run my display at 1/2 the resolution meaning text is super blurry. I'm using windows 10 that seems to not give me an option. Any suggestions ?

Thanks

 

I have been using a 4k for a while everything works fine. Main thing is how much further you are going to be scrubing your mouse around

 

My UI is all blocky and ugly. Can you ask your friend what he did to make Unity 5 look decent on a 4K display? i currently have a 28" 4K

 

Any updates here, since it's been about 8 months since the last post? Hoping someone has some good news that it scales well with 4K, I'm on the fence about a laptop purchase and would like the greater real estate, but don't want to have unreadable UI elements, etc. THANKS!

 

Retina and HDPI support are on the roadmap for 5.4 which is due March 16th.

http://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

 

Retina works great in 5.4.

 

how about for windows 10? (i think OSX calculates scaling differently then Win, no?)

@Ryiah, i noticed that, but I didn't know all that it entailed

 

Thought i'd make an update on this.

Back at the end of December 2015 my Primary monitor died completely ( last time it was the external power brick so was replaceable), by chance my secondary monitor had serious issues at the same time. So I looked into this again and in the end i went with getting an UltraWide 34" 3440x1440 monitor instead of 4k ( AOC U3477PQU)

The reasoning behind this was that I just don't think applications or the Window OS is ready for 4K and had heard that HDPI support in Unity for Windows was being pushed back again.

I tried out Photoshop using Windows scaling at 200% and didn't like it, I felt it was too big and wasting space, 150% would be far better, but sadly many applications simply wont offer this or look very good. It was also my understanding that Unity on Windows would be suggested to run at 200% else the ui rendering wouldn't look as good, how bad it might look is anyone's guess though.

It was at this point I had the realization that while having OS scaling is nice, a one size fits all approach for applications is the wrong way to go. Applications need to have custom overrides for their UI, so that you can tweak the scaling per application as each one can be so different in usage. Currently the only application I know that can do this well is Blender with its completely customisable dpi setting. Its a shame that I don't think Unity is going to go this route due to too much legacy code in the UI, they will as I understand it work at say 150%, but it wont look as good or sharp.

Now this brings up an interesting point. In my opinion if you want 4k purely for higher quality visuals ( I.e. that 'retina' effect) then go for it ( though probably wait till Unity offers Windows HDPI feature), as long as you don't mind what I consider to be wasted space you'll be happy. However if you view 4K as a means to increase the screen-estate then I think its currently a harder sell. Sure you will get more space, but if all the applications end up using 200% UI scaling, I feel you end up losing a large amount of the space as you are essentially just doubling the used dpi, not the usable amount of pixels.

Anyway long story short, after looking into 4K vs Ultra-wide I decided that for now ( or at the time ) it was safer to go ultra-wide. I think ultra-wide is a far better fit that 4k for productivity, the 1440 pixels height gives plenty of room for say Unity's inspector, whilst the width means I can run two different applications side by side if I want. I felt that a 4K device would probably end up wasting vertical space.

The upside of the AOC is that it has full swivel, tilt and height adjustments, great for making it portrait which will help for some of my specific client work. It had a full set of inputs ( DP, DVI, HDMI, VGA), picture-in picture and picture-by-picture for using multiple machines on the same monitor. Sure Ultra-wide is a little wide I do have to move my eyes to go from one side to the other, but overall its not a huge amount more effort than my previous 28" 25560x1440 monitor.

The only downside to ultra-wide is app development for Retina iOS devices. I would love to have a 1:1 fit on screen for say new iPads ( 2048x1536), but for that you would need 4k. However with prices dropping I could easily see myself buying a cheap 4k should the need arise for it, but would likely stick with my Ultra-wide for day to day work.

P.S. Another factor for choosing ultra-wide is it seemed to fit better for my gaming needs. Games like Rocket league with my GTX970 can run natively and still hit over 60 fps. I don't think many games can push 4k without dropping quality settings. The AOC has technology so you can have 1:1 resolution to pixels ( instead of stretching). I suppose 4k monitors would have the same, but you'd have more wasted vertical space and it might look odd having say a 1920x1080 window on a 4k monitor

.

 

Great choice on the ultrawide, I love mine to death.

 

Any from Unity know if the 5.4 will offer 150%? or just 200%?
(great update @Noisecrime )

 

another thought... about 150% scaling in general, on a 4K monitor (which many people seem to desire)...

if I want 150%... instead of going to 3840 × 2160... at 150%... would everything look clean and crisp at a resolution of 3K (2880 x 1620) and then leave scaling at 100%? or am I nuts? or is that bad to not run it at the native resolution of 4k?

 

I would assume since you're no longer running at the native resolution of 4k it will look blurry since its no longer 1:1 pixel coverage on the actual monitor. It would probably work if your 4K monitor had a 1:1 pixel mapping setting, but then you'd just be using a smaller area of your screen surrounded by black ( i.e. like letterboxing, but here it would surround the image). and having tried that with 1920x1080 on my ultra-wide it is very weird feeling to use.

To be honest even if it does work I wonder what the point would be when you can get ultra-wide for 3440x1440 or 2560x1440 monitors which are both close to 2880x1620.

 

This is for a laptop, so I only have one 15.6 inch display to work with.

 

Monodevelop and Visual Studio do 4K perfectly on both OSX and Windows. I hope Unity is able to get the editor also supporting 4k soon.

Unity 5.4 is supposed to fully support Retina displays, it's stated in the roadmap. In Unity 5.3, text is blurry but it's supposed to be crisp in 5.4.

I just tried out the Unity 5.4 beta. On Windows, the beta version does NOT support 4k screens any differently than Unity 5.3. On OSX, 5.4 is doing something different. When I enable scaling in OSX's display settings, Unity is trying to do something, but on my computer, it's not right, it's not usable. See this screenshot. I really hope they fix this. The workaround for me is going with a non-scaled mode where everything is super tiny.

 

I've never tried ultrawide but I love my 4k monitor. I got a 23.6" Acer 4k monitor for $343 in January. It looks amazing. Windows 10 supports 4k well enough. Visual Studio and Monodevelop work perfectly. Coding in 4k with super crisp text is amazing. I'll never go back.

The Unity editor is blurry with 4k. That is, it looks just as blurry as a normal 1080 screen. Just because Unity does not support 4k yet, that's no reason not to get it. If you do a lot of coding, you'll love 4k.