single stepping through the frames it looks like when it 'reloads' the view when more icons are available (this is async loading) it clears the view again with no icons, then shows the new set of icons..

I am not sure why/how this happens. Will look into it if I can see something in the code.

(please still provide some info about your setup)

If I step through it, I see these frames in a row:

Hey thanks for the reply. I was able to identify what caused it. When i comment out the second line with 1.25x scaling, the problem doesn't occur:

monitor=,preferred,auto,auto
# monitor=DP-3,preferred,auto,1.25,bitdepth,10

I'm using rofi-wayland 1.7.9.1-1 on hyprland 0.49 with wayland 1.23.1-2

I now notice in the video that on the first frame all icons are fuzzy (upscaled), then on next display they are sharp.

we don't know the size until after we display one frame. Then we need to re-calculate everything and reload

Ah that makes sense then.

you could try latest git, see if that helps

I manually built the binary from davatorium/rofi and can confirm the issue persists there as well :)

I see it tries to estimate dpi, but not scale. This is going to take some thoughts.
(I can indeed reproduce the effect).

Would the fractional scaling protocol help at all with estimating scale?