Disable Font Smoothing?

[abs1nth]

Is there a way to disable font smoothing? It gives me eye strain which in any other game I would just bear with. But in a game with that much text, it makes nigh unplayable for me.

 

Cheers!

[AndreaColombo]

What exactly do you mean by "font smoothing"? I'm unaware of any such features in the game.

[Nicholas Steel]

What exactly do you mean by "font smoothing"? I'm unaware of any such features in the game.

He could be playing at a resolution where the HUD and text has to either be upscaled or downscaled and the process might be blurring the font.

[AndreaColombo]

As of 2.0 the font renders at whatever resolution your screen is set to; it shouldn't look blurry anymore (it doesn't for me, and I play at 2560x1440.)

[abs1nth]

What exactly do you mean by "font smoothing"? I'm unaware of any such features in the game.

Font smoothing is using some method such as anti-aliasing on fonts. Windows uses it by default for instance, they call it "ClearType". While seraching for a solution I also stumbled on a post by Josh Sawyer stating that font smoothing would be a priority for them.

 

Most smoothing afaik is done through some very fine blurring like anti-aliasing which can make it difficult to focus on it for your eyes and thus cause eye-strain. Most people apparently don't have this problem or are unaware of the effect.

 

Not all smothing is the same, though. I didn't have any issues playing Wasteland 2 for instance.

[AndreaColombo]

Could you post a screenshot that shows this?

 

I know fonts were blurry as eff when upscaled but that shouldn't be happening any longer as of version 2.0 so it's probably a subtler effect I'm unaware of.

[abs1nth]

No, not visibly blurry, the same way that anti-aliasing isn't visibly blurry, yet most AA uses blurring to smooth out the edges. It's so small that it isn't visible.

 

Example:

[AndreaColombo]

Understood. I was indeed unaware.

 

Let's see what Obs come back with, then

[Aarik D]

Hello abs1nth,

 

I don't believe there is a way to disable font smoothing, but if you say most AA uses it, then try moving the quality slider all the way to the left, that will disable AA in our game. 

 

Thank you for your support. 

[Nicholas Steel]

I still don't know why that Slider is called "Quality" instead of "MSAA" or "Anti-Aliasing", unless it does more than control anti-aliasing and if it does do more than it does a poor job anyways at explaining what the slider controls.

[AndreaColombo]

My best guess is they thought not all users would be familiar with the terms "MSAA" or "antialiasing", but everyone would understand "Quality" and the fact that maxing it out looks prettier, while reducing it runs faster.

[Nicholas Steel]

My best guess is they thought not all users would be familiar with the terms "MSAA" or "antialiasing", but everyone would understand "Quality" and the fact that maxing it out looks prettier, while reducing it runs faster.

Which would be fine, if MSAA and variations of anti aliasing weren't mentioned in an enormous array of games from 2004 onwards by their actual abbreviated name. MSAA, FXAA, MLAA, SMAA, SSAA etc. terms are seen in tens of thousands of games, their extremely common encounters in PC video game.

 

I'll admit, SMAA and MLAA are the least common of the lot to a large degree. That doesn't mean the other terms should be obscured, you're obscuring them for no reason other than to confuse people in to not knowing why a setting causes huge performance losses and barely has a perceivable effect (unless you're already aware of aliasing).

 

You're deceiving people in to thinking the setting has a grander effect on quality than what it actually does, which leads to people needlessly putting up with low FPS because they don't want to sacrifice what is likely perceived to be a setting that has a large effect on the visual quality (shadow resolution, # simultaneous light sources, texture resolution, particle density, view distance etc. can easily be associated with a slider that has a generic "Quality" name attached to it).

Edited January 10, 2016 by Nicholas Steel

[abs1nth]

Hello abs1nth,

 

I don't believe there is a way to disable font smoothing, but if you say most AA uses it, then try moving the quality slider all the way to the left, that will disable AA in our game. 

 

Thank you for your support. 

Thanks, I already had put the slider all the way to the left, I don't think it affects font smoothing.

 

What I've done now is reduced the font scaling to the minimum (70%) which appears to have made reading text a fair degree more easy on my eyes. I still notice it but it's bearable. It also makes the text look pretty crappy and fairly small but I can live with that.

[Nicholas Steel]

1) Are you playing the game at your monitors native resolution (You should be).

2) Font should look best at 100% scaling.

2) If you have a Geforce Video Card the Nvidia Control Panel has a setting that lets the GPU handle upscaling of lower display resolutions instead of your computer display, if you're not running the game at your monitors native resolution you can try toggling this option to see if there is an improvement in visual fidelity.