Radeon 8500LE corrupt fonts with Truecolor and font smoothing

scc

Hi,

I am a newbie to this site. Looks like a great place for ati driver information and help. Anyways, here is my problem. I recently purchased a FIC AT008 Radeon 8500 card to replace my Matrox G400(ancient by PC standards). Everything seems to be fine. 3D games played ok. However, there is just this one nagging problem: Some fonts in Win XP Pro looks corrupted(really rough edges) in Truecolor with font smoothing on. Only fonts with similar color with the background would suffer. If I change to 16 bit colors or turn off font smoothing the problem is solve. However, everything looks bad in 16 bit colors or with font smoothing off. I have tried 4 different bioses, and one old ati driver, new omega driver, new ati driver. Noon solved the problem. If anyone knows what the problem is, please enlighten me.

System:
Pentium III 840(650 oc)
MSI 6309
Win XP Pro

Crash Override

there is 2 types of font smoothing........which one are you using?

scc

I am using the standard font smoothing. Cleartype does not have the problem. However, cleartype makes everything blurry for me.

DallasStar

The fontsmoothing has caused this problem for me before, but not truecolor.

However: if you are using Cyborg's latest drivers, I should tell you that those gave me text corruption no matter what I did to try to fix it. You should try the official 6118 drivers. If they don't fix it, try the ones from ATI's website. If those don't fix it, ask ATI about it, i guess.

MAKE SURE to do a clean install of the drivers each time (look at sticky at the top of forum).

Crash Override

what type of monitor are you using? have you checked that out yet at all? cleartype shouldnt appear blurry.......it should apprear smooth and even

DallasStar

Cleartype appears blurry to me too. This happens for most people with decent CRT monitors.

scc

I am pretty sure the monitor is not problem. I have a Sony G420(19") and it works great with the Matrox G400 I have before.

Jeff

I have heard of this problem before. I pretty much only use ClearType, as I have an LCD Monitor for my Primary display on this computer.

Crash Override

I have a CRT monitor

matter of fact mine is a cheap generic brand monitor and to me the text always looks perfect with ClearType on

it may have to do with the dot pitch on the new high end monitors

scc

I just have a flesh install of Win XP Pro and install the Catalyst 2.1 driver. I still have corrupt fonts. Before I install the Catalyst driver(running the default Win XP driver), it was ok. But then, the performance was unacceptable. Looks like it is something related to the driver that my card doesn't like.

SD-[Inc]

Try one of the leaked driver versions. I use 6102 and the problem appears to be fixed. (I had the same problem with 6094)