Windows 8 font quality in Desktop mode

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daglesj

Supreme [H]ardness
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May 7, 2005
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Anyone noticed any differences with font quality in Desktop mode?

We had a brief discussion on Metro mode but I wonder if anyone has anything unusual to report in Desktop?
 
I get all sorts of font issues - text seems to change from being crisp/clear to anti-aliased/cleartype constantly and the shift is very hard on the eyes. You can see it happening if you just watch the screen for a minute.

This may not be related to Windows 8; but I never saw this issue on Windows 7 and my machine has seen no other changes.
 
The Donut said:
I get all sorts of font issues - text seems to change from being crisp/clear to anti-aliased/cleartype constantly and the shift is very hard on the eyes. You can see it happening if you just watch the screen for a minute.

This may not be related to Windows 8; but I never saw this issue on Windows 7 and my machine has seen no other changes.
Click to expand...

Thats exactly it. the letter I gets what looks like another layer of pixels etc. it seems to be more on the vertical edges of fonts.

Imagine a crisp version of when you used to run a 800x600 screen to a 1024x768 LCD screen with Windows 98SE/NT, that kind of effect.

Have run through cleartype a few times but its just awful. Hopefully fixed for release.

Apparently some changes to fonts have been made in 8 but articles on it are sketchy.
 
It's a known graphics driver issue. I used to have this same exact issue until I kept updating the drivers at each release until I'm now to the point of seeing zero font/aliasing issues.
 
I've tried various drivers, none of which have solved my issue.

It's annoying but I figure it'll get fixed at some point so I just try to ignore it.
 
The Donut said:
I've tried various drivers, none of which have solved my issue.

It's annoying but I figure it'll get fixed at some point so I just try to ignore it.
Click to expand...

What's the video card / program that causes it? I doubt I have the same setup since its working fine for me but I'm curious.

Running Radeon 6950 here.
 
For me its a 5770/Samsung 214T SPVA LCD at 1600x1200 in Firefox mostly. Other apps and browsers have the issue too.

If I swap back my Windows 7 build it goes back to normal.
 
The 5000 series from AMD had font and/or aliasing issues with Firefox in Windows 7. It's nothing new & hasn't been fixed at all. It's not specifically related to Windows 8.
 
daglesj said:
Hmmm well its fine with 7 but poor with 8 so we'll see. I might try another card. I have a 9800GT kicking around.

Its like Cleartype is switched off.

http://www.osnews.com/comments/25710

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20120303/cleartype-takes-a-back-seat-for-windows-8-metro/
Click to expand...

I had the same issue with the Start Screen initially but newer drivers fixed it.

Here's a possible fix
http://www.7tutorials.com/fix-fuzzy...m-windows-live-applications-internet-browsers
 
I'm running a NVIDIA 660Ti on the latest drivers.

I get the text errors in any browser and any Windows application that uses the default font renderer.

It's not consistent and often changes right infront of my eyes; back and forth.
 
daglesj said:
No I had that issue with the MLAA initially in the Metro world but I switched that off.

This is in Desktop land, not the Startscreen/Metro.
Click to expand...

Hopefully AMD gets it working for you...

I have Windows 8 on my wife's PC with a 5000 series GPU (I forget which one...) & there are zero issues with the newest drivers.
 
Yeah not too worried right now, will see when I get the full version in a few weeks hopefully.
 
I have a similar issue (or perhaps the same) in firefox only (and variants such as waterfox and palemoon), but it's weird because it only manifests while selecting text, then I can see the font jump back and forth between two different states (one more bolded, the other less bolded). This is on RTM, with a 580 with the newest drivers (306.xx WHQL). Figured it was a bug in firefox, but it might be in NVidia's drivers.
 
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