Blurry text problem has not been fixed in Win 8.1 RTM

acr731

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I can confirm that M$ did NOT fix the blurry text problem. This is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE for an OS to be released with a bug that was known long before RTM.

There could be legitimate reasons for this, though. The leaked version might not be the real RTM. It could also be a driver issue. Regardless, if this is in fact the real RTM, how could M$ release an unfinished product?

Its another nail in the coffin for Win 8/8.1 in my case. I hope it eventually gets fixed, but as it stands now M$ still has done nothing to sway me towards upgrading from Win 7.

For those who may be wondering, I'm running dual Nvidia 675m cards in SLI.
 

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What blurry text problem? I have yet to see any text that doesn't look sharp, and I have seen it on a number of configurations. Are you sure it's not a driver issue? Did you install the NVidia 8.1 beta drivers? By the way, this is News? Posting in the news section?

Could it be your monitor has a goofy sub-pixel format?
 

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Google it... its a very well known issue. I'm using the drivers from NVidia.com, ver. 320.49.

Native resolution at 1900x1080 looks fine. I usually reduce the resolution a bit because I have trouble seeing the smaller fonts (it sucks getting old). The problem appears in the lower resolutions.

I'll try different (beta) drivers tomorrow. Don't feel like messing with it tonight.
 

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We're talking about 8.1 being released to RTM, which is news at the moment. If it needs to be moved then I guess the mods can do so.
 

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You still have everything set to 125% in your Displays settings, That's why it looks blurry, set it to 100%.
 

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Google it... its a very well known issue. I'm using the drivers from NVidia.com, ver. 320.49.

Native resolution at 1900x1080 looks fine. I usually reduce the resolution a bit because I have trouble seeing the smaller fonts (it sucks getting old). The problem appears in the lower resolutions.

I'll try different (beta) drivers tomorrow. Don't feel like messing with it tonight.

This sounds like a problem with your Monitor's resolution scaling feature. LCD monitors only look good when you run them in resolutions that are a multiple of their native resolution. For instance, if you have a monitor that is 1600x1200 will look decent if you set the resolution to 800x600. Some LCD monitors have the technology in them to scale the signal properly to fit the resolution, but some do not.. and sometimes this scaling conflicts with internal video card settings.

This article explains this in a bit more detail:

HTG Explains: Why Using Your Monitor’s Native Resolution Is Important

Instead of changing your monitors resolution, you should instead change the resolution scaling feature of windows. You may also want to calibrate your display's color, and/or sub-pixel rendering (clear type).
 

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I have many different systems now running 8.1 (that ran 8.0), and if you are using a monitor that uses LCD or LED technology, it will have one default resolution (native scaling at 1:1), and any reduction in that resolution requires the monitor to scale (in it's own hardware) to provide data on screen that is then not using 1:1 scaling with it's native resolution - Windows has NOTHING to do with that.

Windows, nor any drivers, can fix this. You should instead use the native scaling features of the OS (7.x and higher are designed to natively scale up to 150% without any loss in quality at the native resolution, although 8.x does do this better with proper WDDM 1.2/1.3driver support). Make everything larger at any increment above 100% to 150%, or just make text larger (in 8.1). Don't complain that text is blurry on an LCD or LED monitor when you're not using the native resolution - you're yelling against the wind.
 

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Using Native Resolution is part of the solution, but the reason that "blurry text" is found in Internet Explorer and most Windows 8 apps is that instead of using sub-pixel rendering to smooth font outlines, monochrome antialiasing is employed instead.

On some displays this looks awful. On modern high density displays it usually looks better just antialiased. It is not a bug, though - it is a design feature, and that is why Microsoft refuse to acknowledge it as a problem - and thus there is nothing to fix.

Instead of going into details here, there is plenty of information out there:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=s...e&ie=UTF-8#q=sub+pixel+rendering+antialiasing


Why do Microsoft employ this method of font smoothing, instead of their "ClearType TM" technology used throughout Windows Desktop applications?

The first part of the answer is speed. Consider sub pixel rendering - each 1/3 pixel vertical band of red/green/blue needs to be calculated to display correctly - whereas all 3 colour bands are weighted the same for a monochrome antialiased display. Internet Explorer chose the less processor-intensive option to speed up display of web pages.

Secondly, orientation of the display as on the Surface (tablet) or Windows Phone can change between portrait and landscape depending on the choice of the viewer, and subpixel rendering is of no use under these conditions. Zoom in by touch gesture looks bad on sub-pixel rendered text, better on antialiased text.

Thirdly, as far as Apple and Microsoft is concerned, sub pixel rendering technology is on the way out. Like many examples in computer history, Microsoft is following Apple's example here. In the purist world of desktop publishing, fonts on screen should look exactly the way they will print, and not just appear crisp, sharp, readable and slightly distorted in shape on screen for people whose job is to read information off screens in their jobs all day.

Apple can get away with this because they supply the optimized matched hardware and the software. Microsoft Windows at least runs on any "Windows compatible" mixture of components.

If you use quality kit, and large monitors, or very small portable screens, the benefits of subpixel rendering are less obvious. For me, I choose to use Chrome in preference to IE, and I use Metro Apps very rarely.
 

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Thanks to everyone who provided input and suggestions, but the problem is still there. Its not a driver issue, and there isn't anything wrong with my monitor. I don't have this issue with Windows 7, so the obvious solution is an easy one. Windows 8.1 will take a spot on the shelf next to 8 and will stay there until Microsoft provides an update that corrects the issue.

Little things like this are why Windows 8 only has 7% share of the total market.
 

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My Win 8 Pro looks exactly like my Win 7.
 

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Little things like this are why Windows 8 only has 7% share of the total market.
That's due to a combination of being knew, and people believing the crap they read about Windows 8, such as some kind of text issue. it hasn't been fixed, because it doesn't exist, simply put. I work in a company where the majority of employees are over 55. Many of them have the same complaint as you, that at native resolutions, icons and text can be small. Anytime, I repeat, anytime you alter an LCD to a non-native resolution, the image itself is blurry. We are using Windows 7, and I can tell you this to be 100% true. The suggestion to increase the size from 100% to 125% is the only thing you can do without altering the quality of the image.

Feel free to join an ever-decreasing club of people who feel something is wrong with Windows 8/8.1. If there was an issue, it would have been resolved, or there would be workarounds. I'm not finding any documentation to prove such an issue exists...just many forum posts similar to your rant...and all are using non-native resolutions.
 

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I've given up on using either 7 or 8 because font rendering is broken. On my hardware -- Dell U2410 1920x1200 at 96 dpi and ThinkPad W530 1920x1080 at 142 dpi -- the rendering is the worst I've seen. Native resolution, no scaling, good video cards. I see pixelation, smearing, uneven tone in bolded text, gray artifacts inside loops and adjacent to large bold characters.

Smoothing is on. Cleartype is on, but adjusting it has lttle impact. None of the examples it shows me are good enough


This isn't a matter of taste or preference. I have $400 wasted in Win 7/8 install packages because MS can't handle fonts any better than it did 15 years ago.
 

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What blurry text problem? I have yet to see any text that doesn't look sharp, and I have seen it on a number of configurations. Are you sure it's not a driver issue? Did you install the NVidia 8.1 beta drivers? By the way, this is News? Posting in the news section?

Could it be your monitor has a goofy sub-pixel format?
i agree ,not a issue on my older Dell
 

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i agree ,not a issue on my older Dell

I had to turn the sharpness control of my Dell display to 20 percent before I couldn't distinguish individual pixels in text. By then, the entire screen was mottled and unusable.

Font smoothing does not make text look blurry to me. it makes it look sharp and correctly formed. I.e., straight lines should look like solid straight lines, not lines of pixels with gaps in between. Curves, loops and circles should not look like staggered piles of square pixels.
 

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i agree ,not a issue on my older Dell

I had to turn the sharpness control of my Dell display to 20 percent before I couldn't distinguish individual pixels in text. By then, the entire screen was mottled and unusable.

Font smoothing does not make text look blurry to me. it makes it look sharp and correctly formed. I.e., straight lines should look like solid straight lines, not lines of pixels with gaps in between. Curves, loops and circles should not look like staggered piles of square pixels.

so it a monitor issue ,my monitors are 1-SyncMaster 205 and 2- a View Sonic ,both work great with win8 and win8.1, pro and win 8.1 enterprise, i make no setting changes at all in win8 .
 

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so it a monitor issue ,my monitors are 1-SyncMaster 205 and 2- a View Sonic ,both work great with win8 and win8.1, pro and win 8.1 enterprise, i make no setting changes at all in win8 .

No, it is not a monitor issue. Text rendered by OS X and Linux on that monitor looks just fine. I see the same deficiencies on the display of my ThinkPad. I have a friend who has a collection of expensive displays in her photo studio and the fonts look no better there.

Again, this is not a matter of my taste or preference. The characters are not displayed correctly. The center of an "o" should be empty, not filled with something that looks like a gray spiderweb.. The left side of a "D" or an "E" or an "L" should be flat and smooth, not bulging irregularly with dark pixels. A black 48 pt character should not be shadowed by gray artifacts or look like it is rendered in two tones of black.

I'd give Windows another try if someone could suggest something new. I've been told to adjust Cleartype. As I said, that doesn't change much of anything. I've been told to buy a new monitor or a new video card. That's not going to happen. I've been told to buy a display with higher DPI. My thinkPad runs at 142 DPI. Try to find something higher in the mainstream.

Obviously, a lot of people like Windows font rendering. There are even people who like XP rendering with Cleartype and smoothing off. (That text looks like it's made with sausage links to me.) But, there are also a lot of people who don't like it, and there are people like me who think it is essentially unusable.

What's most disappointing to me is that, apart from the rather useless Cleartype, there seems to be no way to alter the font rendering, for better or for worse.
 

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Yes, it is a monitor issue. If it works fine on most monitors, but not yours.. then it's a monitor issue. I've seen Windows 8 on roughly 2000 systems, with hundreds of configurations and hardware.. Not one of them has had these font problems you speak of.

Yet somehow, all you see are font problems everywhere you look. Weird, isn't it? If this isn't a personal preference thing, then it's a monitor thing, or a calibration thing. It's one or the other, because the vast majority of people don't seem to have any problem with Windows font rendering. I can buy that you may have a piece of hardware that doesn't work well with the rendering, but if you see bad rendering everywhere you look, then there's something else going on here.

I recall I had this friend who used to complain all the time about how unstable Windows was. One day, I went with him to buy a new computer. When he got it home, the first thing he did was open up Windows explorer and start deleting system DLL's. I asked what the hell he was doing, and he said "I have always don this... I got an email years ago that told me to delete these files because they were dangerous".

So, restoring his system and telling him NOT to do this, he found his system worked without crashing. He had always just been doing something stupid, and then blaming Windows for his problems for years. I suspect there is something like that going on here, since the people that complain about this tend to be "tweakers".. they're always playing with settings and changing things, and my guess is that they always do some setting that they think helps their system but hinders it, and they don't even realize it. Then they blame Windows for it.
 
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Again, this is not a matter of my taste or preference. The characters are not displayed correctly. The center of an "o" should be empty, not filled with something that looks like a gray spiderweb.. The left side of a "D" or an "E" or an "L" should be flat and smooth, not bulging irregularly with dark pixels. A black 48 pt character should not be shadowed by gray artifacts or look like it is rendered in two tones of black.

.
maybe i just don't see it or i need new glasses , the attachment is a web page from Firefox browser and it looks fine to me,i some time use 3 different browsers on my computer and they all seem to be doing there job of rendering fonts.
could you post a screen show of how bad yours looks
 

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or maybe this is what you mean,from fonts in control panel .
but this is the only place i see this .
 

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    gigibyte ga-78lmy-s2p
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    4gig ddr3
    Graphics Card(s)
    Radon hd5000 Series
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    19" viewsonic/ 22"Samsung
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    1680x1050
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