Support for 4K Monitors

Over the past 6 months we’ve had calls on support from customers that have purchased 4K monitors. Customers have been having stability and display issues with SolidWorks, on these 4K monitors, so I’d thought we’d clear things up with the current support on this hardware.

It’s not that a 4K monitor will not work with SolidWorks it’s more the fact that the SolidWorks Development team do not have access nor are they testing SolidWorks on this kind of hardware, so SolidWorks is not set up to run resolutions up near 4K.

We’ve seen issues when Windows text scaling (or DPI) is greater than 150%, or if you use a resolution that approaches 4K (3840 x 2160).

So if your display runs close to the 4K resolution and you experience user interface problems, currently SolidWorks are asking that you lower your resolution by half if its set very high or reduce the text scaling below 150% if that setting is in use. (in the control panel as per the image above)…

These settings should allow you to work safely within SolidWorks 2015 or earlier.

The fault itself is listed as as a bug report to SolidWorks under “SPR#692085 Support very high resolution displays (4k displays)” and some good news here is that this is resolved in Solidworks 2016 (subject to final testing we believe) so the full resolution display should be usable as soon as the 2016 release is available.

We’ve also found another report under SPR#688566 – Text gets compressed and font size in Tools > Options differs with DPI 150% and 125%.

In conclusion: before you go out and buy new hardware, please check with us at Support before you do, it’s not worth spending thousands ok new hardware and it’s no good running SolidWorks on it. You can always check system requirements on the SolidWorks website at http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/hardware.html

Thank you for reading.