My words on free/open source software

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

(Don't) Use "Subpixel Smoothing" for Fonts in GNOME

I proposed that "Subpixel smoothing" was slow in my testing. But that result was machine-dependent. Some drivers were doing better than others. Personally I think Intel's video cards are better than that from nVidia (ATI's seems not bad either). I have to admit for some configurations subpixel rendering products better result. So it's totally up to you to decide whether to use it or not (I found myself enabled it on all my machines for now, even on a slow machine with nVidia card).

Old post follows:

It's extremely slow, while the gain in font appearance is little. This setting has contributed a lot to my bad impression about GNOME's sluggish display. Now I'm happy with "Best shapes."

In gnome-terminal, Subpixel smoothing is 3 times as slow as "Best shapes" rendering, on my laptop.

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Santa Cruz, California, United States