Steam overlay chat is blurry

[ElOhTeeBee]

Exactly what it says in the topic - the chat windows in the in-game steam overlay are really blurry to me. Any idea what causes it?

[chris]

Is your game resolution lower than your screen resolution?

For example, if your screen has a native resolution of 1920x1080, but you run the game at a lower resolution like 1280x720 or 1366x768, then things won't be as clear.

[ElOhTeeBee]

No, it's not - both the game and my monitor are at 1920x1080.

[_I_]

try this
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/enable-disable-window-7-cleartype-text-anti-aliasing-with-cleartype-switch/

windows cleartype makes fonts blurry, try disabling it

[2point4]

Or you could try tuning ClearType. Which operating system are you using? If you're on 7 or 8 you can press your Windows key on your keyboard and type "cleartype" and the selection that shows up should be something like "Adjust ClearType Text". Fire that up and follow the instructions. If you're on Vista:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/tune.aspx

If you're on XP:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/step1.aspx

[ElOhTeeBee]

Adjusting cleartype did nothing.

[2point4]

Which game(s) are you noticing this in? Do you have a screenshot?

[ElOhTeeBee]

Every game in the steam overlay. In addition, it also happens in dota 2 outside of the overlay.

The weird part is, any screenshots taken with steam's screenshot manager don't show the blur. I had to use print screen and upload to imgur for this one: http://i.imgur.com/9La3y.jpg

[ElOhTeeBee]

Here's a screenshot of the steam overlay: http://i.imgur.com/BAynt.jpg

[ElOhTeeBee]

Issue was fixed by disabling FXAA antialiasing in the Nvidia control panel.

[Dori V•V]

Nice that you found a solution - if you want to try something else, toggle the selection under "View->Settings->Interface->Enable DirectWrite for improved font smoothing and kerning". I don't know exactly what it does and it probably works best under default settings for most users - but maybe it's different for your specific setup.

[ElOhTeeBee]

I tried that. Didn't help.

[Dori V•V]

Hm strange. I'm just curious - what graphics card do you have? Are your drivers up2date?

[ElOhTeeBee]

Currently using an NVidia GeForce GTX 660. And yeah, drivers are updated.

[Dori V•V]

Hm ok, after a bit of googling probably FXAA is the only solution as it is a known side effect of it, for all graphic cards. Just learned something new, thank you ;)

[Dr. House]

Just for the future. Use PNG format and not JPG for screenshots, because jpg format adds artifacts to the images while png will preserve the images exactly as you see it. Like this http://www.jonmiles.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/png-vs-jpg.png (PNG left, JPG right).