2D IQ: 8500 vs. 9700pro, which better?

[chaoliang]

Thanks a lot for the links, Indiana!

[Chrono_Wanderer]

i checked again. the text is actually very very readable on my 19" viewsonic @ 1600x1200 for some reason, in fact no ghosting at all. strange. my G550 cannot do as well as the 8500

edit: but at lower resolution (i.e. 1280x1024) the G550 does much better... little text were "cut off" on my R8500 at that resolution.

edit: hehe nice new sig Helevitia!

[Helevitia]

I can tell you without a doubt that the IQ improved dramatically from my Orginal Radeon to my Radeon9700 Pro. To give you an example, when I upgraded to XP, I turned on 'clear type' font and noticed an immediate improvement visually with my old Radeon. Once I got my 9700Pro, the text was horribly blurry with 'clear type' on. I turned it off and tada! Sharp as glass. I am sad to say that bove 1600x1200, ghosting, washed out colors and blurrines starts to occur and continues all the way up to 2048x1536.

Dave

[Chrono_Wanderer]

speaking of ClearType, so far my personal encounter is: looks %^&(%^& on all my cards. It looks bad on G550, G200, and R8500 lol. so i never enabled it.

[chaoliang]

I observed that ClearType improved something on a laptop display with poor qality. Maybe it was primarily designed for LCD? It blurrs on my Voodoo3 too.

[GT98]

Originally posted by chaoliang
I observed that ClearType improved something on a laptop display with poor qality. Maybe it was primarily designed for LCD? It blurrs on my Voodoo3 too.

From what I understand its made mostly for LCD displays. I like it since it gives the icon fonts a shadow under them making them easier to read

[GNEP]

"Font smoothing" - justs AA's largish truetype fonts normally on any screen (CRT or LCD). This is done in software on all cards other than Parhelia, which accelerates it and adds gamma/colour correction.

"Cleartype" - uses the RGB subpixels to produce finer smoothing on fonts in XP. Only works on LCD screens where the RGB elements are in a fixed and known order. Parhelia does not accelerate this. Should not be used on CRT screens as it can produce unpredictable results, even on ?Trinitron tubes (a pixel might not be RGB but BRG for e.g.)

I think. Don't quote me on this...

The result? Use Font smoothing not cleartype in XP on a CRT.