Is a Catalyst setting causing in-game text to appear grainy and blurry?

peppergomez

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I have 2 AMD 6970 cards in Crossfire, running the latest Catalyst and CAP drivers.

In both Skyrim and the space sim X3:Albion Prelude, the text looks grainy, distorted and a bit blurry, even at the highest graphics settings.. In X3 b/c the text is small, is downright difficult to read, even on a 30" monitor from about 2-3 feet away. In Skyrim, it just looks grainy and ugly (not due to the font style, just to the graininess)

I am wondering if there is a Catalyst setting that I can disable which might solve this problem?

If this isn't a known problem with a graphics setting, I have a bad feeling that this effect could be due to the anti-glare coating on the HP ZR30w monitor I just bought. But even though the anti-glare coating is somewhat noticable in Windows with black text against a white background, it is tolerable, so it would be surprising if it alone is the cause of this distortion.

The images are compressed but even at 30" in the game, the text is somewhat distorted.

full-1446-25717-x3screen00001.jpg


full-1446-25716-screenshot419.png
 
Edit-

As far as X3 goes, looks like I found the reason (well, a friend did): Disabling Morphological Filtering solved the text distortion problem. It made it a bit better in Skyrim, too, though it still looks grainy.
 
Is anyone else having this problem? When I scale IE pages the images look really messed up like they standing off the page and in fuzzy vision. When I play games everything has this blurry look to it. I cut MLAA off as it is just a terrible "feature". Think it's something I enabled in my drivers that causes this?

Using the 12.3 WHQL as the 12.4's give me an error that I don't have the proper hardware for the drivers. Fresh Win 7 64 install.

Thx!
 
Do you have morphological filtering enabled in CCC? What filter setting do you have for Anti-aliasing?
 
Everything is set to default in CCC and still the same thing. Filter says Standard and set to use the application's settings. Morphological is not checked.

Here is something weird it does. If I open Firefox and have it windowed everything is perfect. If I open IE and have it windowed on top of Firefox everything is fine at 100% zoom. If I zoom in on IE the text and images are blurry. If I switch to Firefox the images are now blurry and the text is perfect. If I set the zoom in IE back to 100% then the text and images in both browsers are now blurry. Is this common? Or something weird that my PC is doing?

Every time I fire up a game my text gets screwy on my desktop. Looks like fake 3D or something. Say fire up BF3 and hit the Windows key to put it into windowed mode. My desktop looks fuzzy and BF3 hasn't looked right since I switched from Nvidia to ATI. I've formatted my SSD so there aren't any Nvidia drivers lurking about. Think I have a bad card? Not enough juice to run the 7950? This power supply ran 460's OC'd just fine though.
 
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You filter doesn't say box, edge detect, etc?

What do you have for mipmap detail level?

I know on my 5870 morphological filtering made all the text look blurry. Maybe try enabling different settings running the game and then disabling settings to see if you can get it change in anyway.

Have you tried disabling crossfire to see if still occurs?

Do you have any CCC profiles created?

Do you have another monitor to try to if its display related?
 
try setting in CCC and games the 'worst' AA settings possible manually. try it in the games first, as theres no way in drivers to set zero AA. The dirty secret of AA is its really the equivalent of using the blur tool in photoshop all over the edges of geometry.I personally see no reason/point for AA with modern resolutions, if your noticing aliasing your staring at the game instead of playing it... it was a bigger deal back in quake 3 etc days when everything was sharp edges and the ants effect was crazy, games do a better job somehow preventing it from my experience

May be helpful manually setting 16x AF in the driver, any other quality settings to max
 
You filter doesn't say box, edge detect, etc?
It has the option for Edge but I have it set to Standard. There is no Box option.

What do you have for mipmap detail level?
Don't see that in the options. I'll look harder and update this post.

I know on my 5870 morphological filtering made all the text look blurry. Maybe try enabling different settings running the game and then disabling settings to see if you can get it change in anyway.

I will try more settings. I had turned on the GPU scaling before and others, but I cut all that off and reset all the options to default so that I can see if that would fix it. Games look a ton better but the IE /Firefox thing still happens. I really want to be able to scale webpages as sometimes the operator of sites seem to think the smallest text possible is awesome.

Have you tried disabling crossfire to see if still occurs?
No Crossfire. Just this lone 7950. I did install the CAP because it has settings for solo cards.

Do you have any CCC profiles created?
Never tried to make one so no.

Do you have another monitor to try to if its display related?
Tomorrow morning I can grab my nephew's monitor. He just left for work and won't be back before midnight.
 
try setting in CCC and games the 'worst' AA settings possible manually. try it in the games first, as theres no way in drivers to set zero AA. The dirty secret of AA is its really the equivalent of using the blur tool in photoshop all over the edges of geometry.I personally see no reason/point for AA with modern resolutions, if your noticing aliasing your staring at the game instead of playing it... it was a bigger deal back in quake 3 etc days when everything was sharp edges and the ants effect was crazy, games do a better job somehow preventing it from my experience

May be helpful manually setting 16x AF in the driver, any other quality settings to max

Doing this gave me the best results. No AA and games look much better but IE /Firefox are still doing the blur thing I talked about above. This is odd as my 460's didn't do this amount of blur. Is this just an AMD thing? Please don't think I'm hating on AMD; as you see in my sig I own a BD. Just curious as to why I have to disable AA to get decent visuals as I didn't before.
 
theres i remember two different ways to align the rgb cells of a monitor and microsofts cleartype assumes the common one, see if playing around with cleartype yields any results?

Your 460's perhaps didnt do such a good job at doing the AA thing with dx10/11 titles as your current card, just a guess?

You might be like me, i feel im anti AA or somthing, becuase i have always preferred it off, finding it to always blur the whole screen up. i been on both ati and nvidia sides of the camp. I do recall that some cards were completely incapable of doing AA on DX10, so that might be a lead for your research?
http://www.7tutorials.com/fix-fuzzy...m-windows-live-applications-internet-browsers

you do have morphological AA turned off right?
 
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Yes, Morphological is completely off. I can't see anyone 20 feet away in BF3 with it on because it blurs them into the background. Last match I tried with Morphological on I went 2 - 36. I only stayed in that match because I finished an assignment for knifing people and didn't want to lose it. If I cut it on I can't even read my soldier's name in Battlelog and can't see his pic because it is all a smear on the page.

Morphological is evil! :)
 
Oh man that website you linked is exactly what is happening to me! It looks exactly like what my text looks like when I try to scale IE. The hotfix from MS said it didn't apply to my computer. You think when the webpages scale that morphological crap comes on regardless of wether the box is checked or not? That's the only thing I can think of that is happening.
 
is it only web browsers that have the issue? you could turn off hw rendering. a lot of nvidia people need to do that due to bsod issues, so your sort of in deep shit on either boat. suppose its a handy thing about keeping my 5870, the drivers are extremely stable?
 
The new AMD drivers are ok, but not nearly as stable as your 5870 drivers. Main issue right now with them is the driver recovery error after the monitor has cut off. Very annoying bug! And for some reason the WHQL drivers don't work properly with my overclocking software. There is a file that you add to your system to initiate overclocking and all it does is make my drivers recover in an endless loop. I haven't gotten to the overclocking part as the PC won't even run with it added to the system.

I think they could really do a better job with drivers as the older ones, although slower with certain games, don't crash like the new ones do. Also I didn't have the fuzzy text problem then like I do now.
 
The new AMD drivers are ok, but not nearly as stable as your 5870 drivers.
You have figured that out how? Through youre individual experience or with an actual comparison based on facts and numbers? Cause I havent had a single issue between the 6870CF/6870/ and 7970. They are all running just fine and the CCC doesnt confuse me at all.


Main issue right now with them is the driver recovery error after the monitor has cut off
Main issue with them for some people*
 
You have figured that out how? Through youre individual experience or with an actual comparison based on facts and numbers? Cause I havent had a single issue between the 6870CF/6870/ and 7970. They are all running just fine and the CCC doesnt confuse me at all.



Main issue with them for some people*

So what you're telling me is that it's our fault the cards don't like to cut our monitors off. I'll get right to programming the next set of drivers ASAP! And I'm not confused how CCC works. I have the Morphological turned off in the drivers. I Googled and disabled Morphological long before I posted in this thread. Obviously I read the OP otherwise I'd never have dug up this thread.

I came here to ask what was wrong and get some help when that failed. Nice guys told me to disable AA altogether which fixed most of my problems. What's your problem with me and others having issues with drivers? Like I said earlier I never had to disable AA when I had Nvidia cards. I'm just telling the truth. I'll do whatever works to get the result I want. I don't like pompous asses implying I'm stupid.

I'd like to hear this explanation on why your AMD drivers are better than my AMD drivers. Proceed and get as technical with your facts as possible.

Thank you!
 
I have 2 AMD 6970 cards in Crossfire, running the latest Catalyst and CAP drivers.

In both Skyrim and the space sim X3:Albion Prelude, the text looks grainy, distorted and a bit blurry, even at the highest graphics settings.. In X3 b/c the text is small, is downright difficult to read, even on a 30" monitor from about 2-3 feet away. In Skyrim, it just looks grainy and ugly (not due to the font style, just to the graininess)

I am wondering if there is a Catalyst setting that I can disable which might solve this problem?

If this isn't a known problem with a graphics setting, I have a bad feeling that this effect could be due to the anti-glare coating on the HP ZR30w monitor I just bought. But even though the anti-glare coating is somewhat noticable in Windows with black text against a white background, it is tolerable, so it would be surprising if it alone is the cause of this distortion.

The images are compressed but even at 30" in the game, the text is somewhat distorted.

ZR30W here and I have no blurry text issue. Did you download the latest monitor drivers from the HP site (just run the program to decompress the drivers and then cancel the setup. Use device manager and update your plug and play monitor where the extracted HP drivers are. Then go to your monitor color management and select the ZR30W with the checkmark "Use my settings for this devices" go to Advanced and select the "HP ZR30w LCD Monitor" for Device profile and select WCS profile for ICC viewing condition") Also make sure you redo your clear type settings in Windows 7.

Or you might need to driver sweeper it to make sure you nuked everything and re-install the videocard drivers and monitor drivers :)
 
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