Ugly WPF text rendering - can't disable hardware acceleration on Vista

Question

I'm experimenting problems with text rendering in WPF (third party applications and mine too). Labels and other text don't display correctly, look a little blurred and are rendered with some random colored pixels around.

I'm working on a low end crap machine (SiS Mirage 3 graphics) with Vista SP1, .NET 3.5 SP1 and graphics driver updated.

Another poor souls having similar problems were answered to try disabling hardware acceleration for WPF using Microsoft instructions to change the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration

The ultimate issue to me is: I can't find "Avalon.Graphics" in the registry at all. It's not there. Someone have a clue?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Have you tried just creating it? It's specifically mentioned in MSDN, so I'd imagine it's correct (or rather I'd hope it was correct :-))

Answer 2

Have you tried setting SnapToPixels? This did wonders to a lot of our views. I know exactly what you are talking about, though.

Try:

<Window ..
     SnapToPixels="True">
...
</Window>

And see if that makes a difference.

I have noticed a bit of blurring when applying TextEffects, so if you are doing that you might want to look at turning those down or off and see what you get.