Got new Video card, Text is blurry in windows!!

I just upgraded from a 5900xt to a 6800 geforce. Text in windows is blury. Really driving me nuts, I'm about to swap back to my old card. It's giving me a headache. I've tried the sharpness slider bar in the settings, and that seems to help text on buttons and on the taskbar, but gives text on a white background a weird halo effect.

What can I do? Am I just stuck with it? This sucks because I wanted the boost for games, but I spend A LOT of time in windows and photo shop, and now I hate to look at my computer screen.

I have a 17" trinitron CRT btw.

Also, text is clear at 60hz, but at 85hz it goes blurry. I absoutly can not use 60hz, or 75hz as both show a strong flicker that makes me nauseous. My old card I ran at 85hz and it wasn't blurry.

Isaac,

I assume you have updated the drivers?

Bill

Yeah, I un-installed the drivers, rebooted, powered down the machine and swaped cards, rebooted, re-installed the latest forceware drivers & rebooted again.

I'm thinking the chip/circuit components responsible for output is not not as good quality as the one in my 5900XT was...

6800 is PNY brand.
5900XT is AOpen brand.

For some reason a search on google today seems to return more info. Seems it's hit or miss on the 6800 series that the output filtering components (caps and coils) contribute to this. Leadtek is said to have clear/clean 2D. I even found a site that says they shorted the coils and rmoved the capacitors. I'm getting so sick and tired of modifying everything I get now-a-days to just work properly. I want stuff to work out of the box with out tweaking it. @(*#$

God this text in this box right now looks so blurry/bleeding.. argh!!(*@#&$(*@#

Have you tried Microsoft's "Clear Type Tuner"?

Ooops, that's for an LCD monitor - you mentioned you have a Trinitron...

What screen rez is this occuring at? I find that at certain resolutions, I neeed to adjust font size and display percentages to get crisp text. After that, I've bene pretty happy.

Mighgt be a good excuse to go buy a big widescreen LCD.

Man, small text is almost impossible to read.
http://hardware.mcse.ms/archive55-2005-4-125777.html
That talks about it more. What to do? I got this card off ebay. Man I swear I should just give up. Everythign ends up beign a nightmare. 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

Sigman, yeah cleartype will be more blurry on a CRT. This is defiantly a output filter problem. Read the link above, and it pretty much sums it up.

RA40: 1024x768 @85hz. LCD will lag me in games (sound crazy, not ms repsonce either related) and costs too much, not to mention the "dead pixel policy" of online merchants so if you get a screen with 7 or less bad pixels you can't return it.

I'm just SOL on this one unless I try another card. :hairpull:

EDIT:
Oh yeah, not just text is blurry, but everything. These icon guys are blurry as heck too. The output filter on this card isn't designed well and is causing blurryness at high output (large res/refreshrates)

If it's a Trinitron try adjusting the moiré pattern on your monitor. I've run into similar situations with my P97 Trinitron.

Nope, that doesn't do a thing. It's really the video card I'm afraid. No tweaks short of changing the SMT components of the filter on the board will work. I'm screwed I'm afraid.

Yup, I think this guy summed it up very well:

Your problem DOES have to do with the filters. Your card's poorly
made filters have a cut-off frequency that is too low for the
bandwidth needed to produce sharp pixels. The higher the bandwidth,
the more "square" the pixels appear, and the sharper your image.
Having filters with a cut-off too low will make the signal appear
more like a sine-wave, which appears blurry.

The filter bandwidth is very important. For instance, 1280x1024@85hz
requires a pixel clock of around 111Mhz, but that doesn't necessarily
represent the needed bandwidth to display the signal, which is often
10x the amount for a nice square wave. Notice how screen blurriness
increases the higher you set your refresh rate. Each 1hz more in
refresh rate is 1280x1024 = 1,310,720 pixels more pixels your screen
has to render. Bandwidth is also why you can't render high-frequency
signals over DVI the way you can over the normal VGA ports/cables.

That's also why you also need good cables for high-resolution images.
High-end monitors often come with coaxial inputs for RGB or RGBHV
separately shielded connections. They prevent ghosting or other
artifacts. I doubt this has to do with cables though, as you've
tried out other video cards which do not have this problem.

I got a leadtek 6800, and like the others say, their filters are great, no problems at all so I guess they still keep their cards up to snuff!!!! Just as clear as my 5900XT was. In addition, it has a custom copper heatsink (the card feels like it weighs 2lbs!!). They put the ram on the back side with it's own large copper heatsink too! The fan speeds default settings are lower than the other card which used the OEM/reference board setup. It also runs cooler. Chalk those two up to the copper heatsink. It unlocks beatifully the extra pipelines and pixel shader just like the other card. So it's quiter, cooler running, and sharp text compared to the other one. I'm happy. Should last me for a while until I need to upgrade my motherboard/CPU. With the cooler runing setup, I can even overclock this I bet easily if I need to. It runs 10C cooler than the other card!

The PNY one? I sold it to a friend who was going to buy my 5900XT but later decided he wanted a 6800. Since he uses an LCD, which runs at 60hz input, the card will have clear output for him, up to really high resolutions (1024x768 at 75hz was fine for me, but flickered too much for me to stand). And since LCD's don't flicker, running it at 60hz is no problem for him.

I got another friend that I think is going to buy my 5900XT. So this finally worked out. Still made me mad that now I have to remember to look into output filters on cards before buying one next time.. Sheeessh. Doesn't anyone use CRT's with high reslutions and refresh rates anymore?? I guess I'll stick with leadtek, I like the quality and their heatsink setup. Very nice!!

I've never heard of this kind of problem before with video cards. All of the crappy cards I have had to experiment with have worked fine more or less.

Sounds like the filter problem that plagued cards many years ago. By removing certain components one was able to improve it.

I guess this is another reason why I went digital (DVI-D video I/O), but I can understand why you like CRTs - I was a CRT diehard until Viewsonic offered me a sRGB color-managed LCD display for my photos.

1024x768 at 85 - that's not high, though! A card that can't cope with that is just BS. I drove my FD Trinitron at that res for six years!

Greenlight, ya, this is the first time I've ran into it myself.

Kevin: This CRT, is one of the best I've seen. I wish it was 19", but oh well. LCD is ok, but I don't like the cost, the chance of dead pixels and you can return it, and not being able to chagne resolutions with out it interpolating and becoming blurry/blocky. I thought about removing the caps/inductors of the filter, but only saw caps and wasn't about to touch the SMT stuff. yeah, 1024x768 was fine at 75hz and below, but it just didn't have the bandwidth for 85hz. I *think* this new card doesn't go up as high on the refresh rates in higher resolutions as the one I just had, but perhaps it's drivers just don't let you because it might get blurry and they don't want you to see that? But it does do 1024x768 @85hz nice and clear, which is all I want to run this small 17" screen at. (it does look great at 1280x1024, just too small for pixel editing which I do a lot of in photoshop). I really like the apeature grill over shadow mask for CRT's.

I heard that LCD's lag your ping time in online games too.. I'll have to read up on that one. I do want LCD some day.... Just dont know how to buy one and not have dead pixels other than going to a store..

On another note, the new card, I used riva tuner to log the temperature, and played over an hour of doom3 death match, after I turned the fan setting for peformance 3D down to a whisper (lower than idle). Temperature didn't even get as high as the last card when it was just running 2d in windows!!! This massive copper heatsink on the card works good!