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This morning I noticed the text in Gmail (in Firefox 4) looked a little funny (kind of thin, maybe some color fringing). I went to work and thought it might be some ClearType issue or something with the way Direct way that FF4 draws to the screen. When I came back from work (I left the computer on), the problem was much worse - way beyond ClearType nit-picking. The text was barely readable.
I opened Chrome and there was no such problem. It seems like only Windows that use hardware acceleration are garbled, and ones that use GDI are not. But, I fired up Dragon Age and didn't notice any problems (I only really looked at the main menu though).
Here is a link to a screen shot that illustrates the problem. Notice how the Windows Live Mesh window is completely unreadable, the text in Firefox 4 (left) is pretty bad, while Chrome, the Windows Control Panel, and the task bar are perfectly fine.
The fact that the problem shows up in screen shots and that it only happens in certain Windows makes me confident that the problem cannot be with the monitor or DVI cable.
I am using the AMD Radeon drivers from 4/27/11. The card I have (MSI Frozr II) came with a slight overclock (810Mhz) out of the box, but it looks like when I'm on the Windows desktop it's not running at full clock (CCC reports 450Mhz). Still, I underclocked it to the stock reference clock (800Mhz) and it made no difference. The idle temperature according to Afterburner is 42-44 Celsius, which seems a tad high but not enough to cause a problem - it's cold to the touch if I open up the machine.
What the heck could be causing this? The problem varies in intensity. As we speak I'm in Firefox and things look better than they did earlier - it'll probably get worse again soon.
Radeon 6950 (MSI Frozr II), Seasonic X 560, Core i5 2500K at stock clockspeeds, 16GB RAM, Asus P8P67 M Pro
Greg
Posted 2011-05-03T04:41:34.090
Reputation: 659
I had tried enabling Morphological filtering in order to solve the original weird-looking Firefox text problem. I disabled it after it didn't appear to work, but maybe it didn't take effect. I just restarted my computer after turning it off and the situation is improved (but I still have the slightly-crappy-looking Firefox text problem). I'll see how it goes. Still, I don't understand how the problem could have intensified over time if it was a driver setting. It seems like it would have been consistently blurry. I'll try to post an update after today. – Greg – 2011-05-03T12:54:13.530
One more (unfortunate) thought - the fact that it shows up in screen shots may be enough to prove that Morphological filtering is not to blame, because Morphological filtering happens so late in the rendering that it does not show up in screen shots. – Greg – 2011-05-03T13:47:57.687
I can report that disabling Morphological filtering (and restarting) seems to have contained the problem to within Firefox 4, and reduced the intensity of the problem to mere annoyingly-color-fringed-and-thin-looking-text rather than all-out blurriness. Reports that Morphological filtering doesn't show up in screen shots must be bogus. I still wish I could make Firefox look better, but it appears a lot of people have that complaint, and either Mozilla or ATI (or Microsoft's Direct Draw team) have to do something about it. – Greg – 2011-05-04T13:22:17.680