612081 - Morphological Anti Aliasing being applied under new AMD graphics cards and drivers

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Ed.the.IV]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b7

Text, menu, and UI elements are blurred from Morphological Anti Aliasing (MLAA) when it and hardware acceleration are enabled.  Disabling either MLAA or hardware acceleration will remove the problem but is not an ideal solution.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Requires an ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5000- or 6000-series graphics card and the Catalyst 10.10e drivers.
2. Enable Morphological Anti Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center under the menu Graphics>3D and check "Morphological Filtering" under the AA or All tab.
3.  Start Firefox 4 Beta with hardware acceleration enabled.
Actual Results:  
Edges of text, menu, and UI elements are smoothed out.  In some cases inconsistently resulting in rough and jagged edges.

Expected Results:  
Text and edges of menus and UI elements should be straight and clearly defined.

Morphological Anti Aliasing (MLAA) is a new feature for AMD graphics cards that is a post processing filter that smooths rough edges that occurs from rendering 3D models in video games.  However, MLAA does not at the moment differentiate between rendered game models and UI and menu items including text.  The same effect is occurring here.  The problem was far more severe under Beta 6 where the browser and web pages were more severely blurred and were unrecognizable but Beta 7 made it more tolerable.

Disabling either hardware acceleration or MLAA removes the problem but is not ideal.  Doing the former is tedious and is a nice feature to have for video games.  Doing the latter negates a feature of Firefox 4.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta, despite having hardware acceleration as well, is not effected by Morphological Anti Aliasing.

Comment 1

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

Hrm, I suppose there must be a sort of flag we can set to disable the filter, I wonder what it is.

Comment 2

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

Please renom if & when this bug gets confirmed.

Comment 3

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

We probably need to fix this.

Kev, we'll need someone at AMD to tell us how to disable or cause us not to be affected by MLAA.

Comment 4

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

Place to start with this is [e-mail] 

Still working on getting us some formal contacts, but that's a good starting point.

Comment 5

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

From comms exchanged with AMD, this is not something that can be user-controlled. What AMD can do is add an application profile entry for Firefox in the Catalyst Control Center to disable MLAA from being applied to the application. AMD will file a bug to make it so, and they've been given beta7 as an example.

If more info is required, I'll update the bug, but this looks like it's out of our hands.

Comment 6

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

I was afraid of this. IE9 must be in the default profile.

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Can they also add Seamonkey.exe to that list ?

Comment 8

[Kev Needham [:kev]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Can they also add Seamonkey.exe to that list ?

Submitted.

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. Requires an ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5000- or 6000-series graphics card and the
> Catalyst 10.10e drivers.

Could we get the specific driver version (from Windows device manager) you're using? It's been requested.

Comment 9

[Ed.the.IV]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Could we get the specific driver version (from Windows device manager) you're
> using? It's been requested.

Driver version is 8.782.1.0 from the Windows device manager.


Here is Graphics Software from the Catalyst Control Center minus the 2D driver file path.

Driver Packaging Version	        8.782.1-101104a-108069E	
Catalyst™ Version	                10.10	
Provider	                        ATI Technologies Inc.	
2D Driver Version	                8.01.01.1081	
Direct3D Version	                8.14.10.0792	
OpenGL Version	                        6.14.10.10244	
Catalyst™ Control Center Version	2010.1105.19.41785

Comment 10

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

We probably need thunderbird as well?

Comment 11

[Paul Kaletta]

I'm not sure whether I experience the same bug, as I have an ATI Radeon HD 3600.  Unter Windows 7 32-bit with the default driver that comes with Windows, FireFox 4 looks fine, however WebGl doesn't work.  Therefore, I installed the most recent Catalyst driver from ATI (I chose not to install the Catalyst Control center).  With this driver WebGl works, but fonts look very blurry.  This can be fixed by disabling 2d hardware acceleration in FireFox.  In my FireFox DirectWrite was disabled by default, enabling it makes no difference.

Here's the grapics section from about:support:

Karten-Beschreibung ATI Radeon HD 3600 Series
Vendor-ID 1002
Geräte-ID 9598
Karten-Ram 512
Karten-Treiber aticfx32 aticfx32 atiumdag atidxx32 atiumdva
Treiber-Version8.821.0.0
Treiber-Datum1-26-2011
Direct2D aktiviert false
DirectWrite aktiviert false (6.1.7600.16763, font cache n/a)
WebGL-Renderer Google Inc. -- ANGLE -- OpenGL ES 2.0 (ANGLE 0.0.0.541)
GPU-beschleunigte Fenster2/2 Direct3D 9

Comment 12

[Loic]

Issue reported on a French board about overclocking, GPU etc: http://www.octeam.fr/forum/index.php?topic=2800.0
Other programs are affected too.

Comment 13

[Mark Rotteveel]

Attachment: Screenshot distorted font directwrite enabled

I think I have the same issue with Thunderbird 9; it did not occur with Thunderbird 8.

Screenshot of distortion in font rendering of message pane & folder tree in Thunderbird 9 with gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled set to true

Not included in the screenshot: message text is not distorted.

Software:
Driver Packaging Version	8.92-111109a-129966C-ATI
Catalyst Version	11.12
Provider	Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
2D Driver Version	8.01.01.1215
2D Driver File Path	/REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0000
Direct3D Version	7.14.10.0879
OpenGL Version	6.14.10.11318
AMD VISION Engine Control Center Version	2011.1109.2212.39826

Hardware:
Graphics Card Manufacturer	Powered by AMD
Graphics Chipset	ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
Device ID	68B8
Vendor	1002
Subsystem ID	E147
Subsystem Vendor ID	174B
Graphics Bus Capability	PCI Express
Maximum Bus Setting	PCI Express x16
BIOS Version	012.020.000.015
BIOS Part Number	113-C01002-S29  
BIOS Date	2010/04/07
Memory Size	1024 MB
Memory Type	GDDR5
Core Clock in MHz	850 MHz
Memory Clock in MHz	1200 MHz
Total Memory Bandwidth in GByte/s	76,8 GByte/s

Comment 14

[Mark Rotteveel]

Attachment: Screenshot no distortion, directwrite disabled

Same situation 583875, but then with directwrite disabled: no distortion observed.

Comment 15

[Burak Yiğit Kaya [:BYK]]

With the latest driver update (http://store.steampowered.com/news/7553/) you can assign per application settings by pointing to their .exe files. This way I have managed to turn morphological filtering off only for firefox.exe and keep it on for everything else. Can anyone confirm this?

Comment 16

[Jia Yuan Lo]

Is this bug tracking for AMD only?
This blurring problem also happens to Intel HD Graphics as well if I turn on Conservative Morphologically Anti-Aliasing (CMAA).

Should I file this Intel-related driver feature issue as a separate new bug or I just follow this one?

Comment 17

[Loic]

As this bug is 5 years and it's about AMD's MAA, I think you can file a new bug about Intel and linked to this one.