cleartype not working in windows 64-bit

[allen200]

not working correctly, that is. before when i was on 32-bit it was fine. now when i check or uncheck the ct activation box it doesnt change anything in browsers. (my desktop text does change though).

advice?

 

[Arainach]

Which browsers?

 

[allen200]

i use ff mostly, but for testing ct i used ff, ie, and chrome. my ct doesnt affect browsers at all.

 

[jiminator]

eh, on my FF the latest update (windows, amd, FF?) causes text to blur. a cleartype adjustment plugin won't fix it, so I just run FF in safe mode.

 

[Unknown-One]

FireFox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 now use DirectWrite to render text with hardware acceleration. DirectWrite comes with angle-independent anti-aliasing built in, regardless of the OS setting. Your graphics card renders the vectorized characters at very high resolution, and then scales the text down to display resolution, resulting in super-sampled anti-aliasing that works with the text in any orientation or at any angle. This can also lead to slightly odd-looking results if you're using a low-DPI display (less than 96 DPI).

You can disable hardware acceleration in FireFox by going to "Firefox > Options > Advanced > General" and un-checking "Use hardware acceleration when available"
You can disable hardware acceleration in IE9 by going to "Gear Icon > Internet Options > Advanced" and checking the box that says "Use Software Rendering instead of GPU Rendering"

You will need to restart both browsers for the changes to take effect.

This will force both browsers to drop back to ClearType (or whatever rendering/smoothing method you've selected in Windows) rather than DirectWrite. There's also an extremely large performance penalty for doing this, but there you go...
Edit: Also, if using an AMD graphics card, make sure MLAA is disabled. The use of hardware acceleration means MLAA now shows up in FF4 / IE9, blurring the text badly.

 

[allen200]

in ff 4, my hardware acceleration was already disabled. cleartype doesnt affect it on either setting.

for ie9, software rendering was not checked. i checked it and cleartype... still does not affect it, on either setting.

any other settings i can fiddle with?

 

[Unknown-One]

Apparently, this works for IE9: http://www.softwareninjas.ca/dwrite-dll-wrapper

 

[allen200]

thanks for that. i will definitely check it out.

but i still find it weird that cleartype just wont work with my browsers. i dont know how to fix it nor do i know anyone else with this problem. i might reinstall windows just to fix this but that would be a pain.