Originally posted by: big4x4
Well then, explain to me the fact why the 5900 can produces clean and crisp text at 1024x768? Pete, you gotta calm down a little. Maybe some people (like me) do not know as much as you! NO ONE has ever told me that you have to run the lcd at its native resolution!
I suppose I owe you a reply considering the rather nasty nature of my previous one. The fact that your 5900 looks good and your 9800 doesn't is something I conveniently overlooked in my bitching. Perhaps nV scales differently, or adds black bars to the top and bottom of your screen to maintain proper geometry (10x7 is 4:3, 12x10 is 5:4)? I can't imagine your 9800 has worse signal quality as such an undemanding setting as 10x7@60Hz. An LCD is meant to run at native res for many reasons, but the main one is that LCDs have a physically fixed number of pixels. A 17" LCD has 1280 pixels going across, and 1024 pixels going down. This is a 5:4 ratio. When you lower your resolution to 10x7, you're now drawing 1024 pixels across and 768 down with a physical grid of 1280x1024--not ideal, as some scaling artifacts will occur when a drawn pixel falls between two physical pixels. You're also stretching a 4:3 resolution to a 5:4 screen, leading to further funkifying of the image. biostud is right, try changing the font size before the resolution. Right-click on desktop > Properties > Settings tab > Advanced button > General tab > 120dpi from drop-down menu. With WinXP, you could also try right-click > Properties > Appearance > Font Size. This way the graphics card outputs a signal that can map 1:1 to the LCD's native resolution, rather that forcing either the graphics card or the LCD to try fitting a circle where a square should be (so to speak).
As for the 60Hz refresh rate, the fastest LCDs have a typical pixel response rate of 16ms. This means they can switch from one color to another in 16ms. 1 color/16ms = 42.5 colors/s, or 42.5fps. This means the fastest an LCD can redraw its screen is roughly 42.5 times a second on average, so even a 60Hz "refresh" rate is faster than an LCD can redraw. Note the term refresh is an anachronism from CRTs, as LCDs don't need to refresh. A pixel is either on or off, it doesn't fade like the CRT's electron gun hitting the back of its glass face. This is why 60Hz doesn't look like it's flickering on an LCD as it would on a CRT, and why most ppl find staring at LCDs for long periods of time less tiring on their eyes than a CRT (no refresh for the eye/brain to process).
If you're using WindowsXP, try enabling ClearType for more readable (IMO) text. ClearType takes advantages of an LCD's subpixels to add extra resolution to fonts, thus making them look more rounded (rather than jagged, or stair-stepped).
Here's a decent PYAITK (put your ass in the know) article on LCDs. It doesn't go into great depth on an LCDs (sub)pixels, but it's a start. I'd be surprised if Anandtech didn't have a similar article, and TomsHardware and TechReport should each have one, too.