Blurry Text in Windows 8

Anonymous
2012-10-27T01:27:12+00:00

I did a clean install of Windows 8 RTM when it became available.

The blurry font rendering that plagued the Preview versions has remained.

It is particularly bad in IE10 and Office 2013.

No amount of adjustment with Clear Type tuner helps much.

I have tried all the fixes recommended like ticking "use Software rendering instead of GPU rendering" in IE10 and in Options in Office 2013.

It makes absolutely no difference.

I installed Windows 8 on completely different hardware to check if it was a graphics card issue. The poor font rendering was still there.

I am currently dual booting Windows 7 and 8 on the same PC. Fonts in Windows 7 remain perfectly clear. In windows 8 they are so bad, the OS is basically unusable.

How do I get readable fonts in Windows 8?

Hardware: ASUS P8Z77-V PRO, Intel Core i7 3770K, ASUS Radeon HD7770 graphics, Samsung Syncmaster 2443BW 24 inch monitor.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2014-10-02T13:21:40+00:00

In Chrome 37.x go to chrome://flags and disable DirectWrite. That's the first thing i did with this update.

Torsten

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-12-17T01:59:11+00:00

    Hi guys. I found the solution, just by curious.

    I go to AMD Vision Engine Control Center, right click and open it.

    Then Gaming -> Anti-Aliasing

    and there I uncheck "Morphological Filtering"..

    And that's all. I hope this is usefull for you!

    Bye :)

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-11-11T22:40:42+00:00

    Just the same with Win 8 Pro Office 2013 and IE10 and NVS 3100M.

    What a shame to ruin their good work with this poor, poor rendering. I was even thinking about a Windows 8 phone.

    Chrome and Android - now they work nearly as well as Apple products.

    Oh dear!

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  3. Anonymous
    2012-11-10T07:59:19+00:00

    More info on this issue can be found at:

    IE10 Consumer Preview Smoothing Fonts Without Any Color

    Please also see the description from Si Daniels of Microsoft (post on March 1, 2012) in this thread:

    Font rendering really poor

    "[Windows 8] uses subpixel positioned grayscale, rather than subpixel positioned ClearType. This change affects the Metro UI, Metro style apps including IE and desktop IE."

    My hope is that a configuration option would be introduced so that one could turn on subpixel positioned ClearType for Office 2013 and at least for desktop IE10. In the meantime, we are in the unfortunate situation where third party apps such as Chrome and Firefox are able to provide the benefits of Microsoft's ClearType technology, while Microsoft's own IE10 and (much of) Office 2013 do not.

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  4. Anonymous
    2012-11-09T22:53:28+00:00

    Same issue here. Font rendering and smoothing are awful. Start screen and Office 2013 CP even worse. Tried to tweak ClearType a little bit but nothing happened. I hope a patch will be released soon to fix this.

    Acer Aspire 5930g/ Nvidia GeForce 9600M latest driver release

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