I am attempting to use an external Acer monitor (1920×1080 max res.) with my OS X Mavericks Retina display (2880×1800). In Windows 7 (through Bootcamp), the OS looks great on the Retina display of my MacBook Pro, but on the external monitor, everything is scaled up. I understand that this is because of the high pixel density on the Mac, where essentially each pixel is represented by 4 pixels (or so I'm told), but I could not find a way to compensate for it on the monitor.
Now, when I run Windows 7 on OSX through Parallels and put in full screen on the external monitor, it works perfectly, and opening up the Screen Resolution window in Windows shows that the resolution of the monitor is 3840×2160, to compensate for the high pixel density on the Mac side.
How can I essentially fake this high resolution in Bootcamp so I get the same effect as I do in Parallels? I have found nothing useful on the Internet, but if it has been already solved somewhere, I would greatly appreciate a link.
And for those wondering why I am using both Bootcamp and Parallels, I use some very memory-sucking programs (Solidworks, AutoCAD) that just don't run as well in Parallels with a shared memory as they do in Bootcamp with all memory for Windows.
Thanks you very much in advance,
Jordan
Best Answer
I managed to fix this resolution issue by lowering the color depth to 16bit for the external display. Not exactly sure why was this necessary, maybe for some reason Windows cannot allocate enough video memory for both displays?