The place where random ideas get written down and lost in time.
2026-06-23 - DaVinci Resolve and Windows High DPI Scaling
Category DEVWhen using DaVinci Resolve on the Windows laptop, I often have Windows in “High DPI” mode -- aka the “Scale” option in the Display Properties. E.g. on a 1920x1080 14” screen, this is set to 150%. DaVinci Resolve by default uses the DPI scaling as it should (that’s called “DPI awareness”).
If you’re curious, you’d want to read the developer docs on the DPI handling, as it’s “interesting” (a.k.a totally not simple):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/high-dpi-desktop-application-development-on-windows
Now the problem with DaVinci Resolve is that once the UI is scaled at 150%, there’s not much space left for the various property panes. Thus that’s one case where I do not want DPI awareness to kick in. There’s no setting in Resolve to do that, but we can notice that Resolve uses the QT library, and we can take advantage of QT’s environment variables for this.
To do this, we simply create a “resolve_1080p.bat” file with this content:
@rem change DPI scaling on laptop (1920x1080 @ 150%, but want Resolve at 100%) @cd "C:\Program Files\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve" @rem disable auto-scaling (this is a boolean) set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 @rem set scaling to factor 1 set QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=1 start Resolve.exe |
Now simply double-clicking that BAT file will set the QT environment variables to ignore DPI scaling, and run “Resolve.exe”. Create a shortcut to that BAT file and place it where you like to see it, e.g. the desktop or some such, and use that to launch DaVinci Resolve instead of the normal launch icon. The benefit of creating a shortcut is that you can thn change the icon on the shortcut whereas you can’t change the icon on the BAT file.
I wrote that script a few years ago and DaVinci Resolve was using QT version 5, thus the variables I have are for QT5. I expect them to stop working at some point since the latest QT6 version has slightly different names for the same environment variables.
They are described here:
- QT5: https://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-5.15/highdpi.html
- QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 → disables automatic HiDPI scaling
- QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO → sets the scale
- QT6: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/highdpi.html
- QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING=0 → disables automatic HiDPI scaling
This is the variable that enables automatic HiDPI scaling. - QT_SCALE_FACTOR → sets the scale
Hope this helps!