Why does text look worse on 4850 than old 7600GT?

pctwo

Senior member
Oct 12, 2003
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I'm using winxp bit sp3, "standard" font smoothing (dislike Cleartype b/c of the color fringes, even though it's supposed to be better for LCD), DVI cab;e, HP f2105 LCD.

With 7600GT, text looks BOLD and dark; with new radeon 4850, text looks kind of faint. I wish I'd mde a screencap when I had the 7600GT installed. The difference is like printing with a fresh new ink toner vs one that's been used for a while. It's not just darker, but bolder too. I thought maybe the 4850 put out higher black level, but that's not it as I checked a grayscale pattern and my monitor is calibrated correctly.

Oddly enough, text on the 7600GT looked like the 4850 now when I used any driver >9x.xx, with some text using certain fonts looking absolutely atrocious, like bad win 3.1 raster fonts (although they're not). So basically, I was stuck using old driver with 7600GT. I upgraded for better gaming only to find worse text.

When I had the 7600, I installed vista beta and didn't like the text there either. prettier, maybe, but harder to read.

I don't understand why there should be a difference b/t cards or b/t driver versions. doesn't windows do all text rendering? if the card is involved somehow, can I turn it off to do softtware rendering?