Currently I’m sorta “forced” into going on vacation. I have too many vacation days leftover from the previous year and the company says I need to go on one, RIGHT NOW!

So here I am.

So I was just talking to a gaming buddy yesterday about… yeah games, what else. During the discussion we were just talking about system specs and such, and suddenly I thought – why not? It’s been almost 3 years since I had my “budget” PC. At the time when I got it, I was under some financial restrictions and had to “make do”. Again, I went to Bell Systems on the 5th floor of Sim Lim Square. Again, the guy there was helpful and suggested a few cost-saving items. All in all, eventually I got a pretty dang good system – AMD Phenom 2 1055T (6 cores), 8 GB DDR 1333 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and the usual chassis, DVD drives etc. The only thing I didn’t get was the hard disk. I was going to bring the old one over from the previous PC, and let Windows auto-detect everything on the new one. After all, I just just done a reformat recently back in June. I don’t want to go through all that again!

True enough, once I got home and moved the harddisk over and booted the new PC up, Win7 autodetected the changes, needed me to re-activate it, and I just had to re-install my Catalyst drivers and everything was back!

It was here that I noticed a new option in the Catalyst drivers, under the Anti-Aliasing options – “Morphological Anti-Aliasing“. Touted as the next step in anti-aliasing technology and naturally in direct competition with nVidia, this mode is supposed to be more efficient and uses less clock cycles (read, “faster”) at making your games pretty. So, I turned it on.

Later on I started to see weird font and image problems with my computer, during non-gaming tasks. Simple things like viewing a web page in Firefox, reading emails in Thunderbird, looked “weird”. In fact I couldn’t put my finger on it till I came to my own blog and noticed that images had rounded corners and the fonts looked squiggly. The frustrating thing was, everything else looked fine. Shortcuts on the desktop looked ok. Fonts on them looked ok. The same webpages viewed in IE looked fine too. No amount of fiddling with font settings in Firefox (and Thunderbird) could get rid of the squiggly fonts.

Then I remembered the previous night, while gaming a friend used Xfire and chatted with me. I noticed the whole box had become blurry and fonts were squiggly but I didn’t know what happened at the time. In an unrelated task, I went into Control Panel and wanted to look at my Java settings. The entire Java control panel came out BLURRY. As in, seriously blurred out. Can’t read a single thing on it. I could vaguely see buttons but I don’t remember what the buttons were.

Suddenly things looked more and more like the MLAA option I had turned on in the Catalyst drivers.

So I went in there, turned MLAA off, and viola~! Things looked normal again.

So I guess I’m leaving this option off till games support this option in-game. I’m not going to turn this option on permanently again!