tl;dr If you have an NVIDIA graphics card and you have your graphics scaled to 100% in Windows, go to the NVIDIA Control Panel and change the ‘Display > Adjust Desktop Side and Position > Apply the following settings: > Scaling’ setting to ‘No scaling’. This fixed the blurry text/screen issue for me.
UPDATE: This fix doesn’t work 100% of the time. Occasionally the screen will get blurry again, but only when I’ve been away from my computer for a while and so the screen has turned itself off. When that happens, I have to go back to the scaling settings and toggle between ‘Aspect ratio’ and ‘No scaling’. Doing that resets the screen and fixes the blurry text issue. Hopefully the next Windows or NVIDIA driver update fixes this problem once and for all!
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll have gathered that I am a typography enthusiast. So you can understand how pissed-off I was when I installed the latest Windows 11 release (24H2) on my gaming PC [1] and suddenly all the text on my screen got slightly blurry.
Blurry photo of what appears to be a large screen on a table, with a large desk lamp placed next to it. (Source: Matthias Oberholzer on Unsplash)
At first I thought this was a browser issue because that’s where I first noticed the problem. But then I realised text was blurry everywhere, including in Microsoft Word and even in Windows menus and panels. And then I noticed that the sharp edges of graphics and images were blurry too. In fact, everything looked a little less sharp! That mean this was a graphics/display issue, not a font rendering issue.
The obvious first step was to update all my Intel and NVIDIA drivers, which I did. But that didn’t fix anything.
Then I did a bunch of extensive online searches, but no luck there either. No one had this specific issue after updating their Windows installs and all the troubleshooting steps that folks recommended didn’t fix my problem.
So then I did what any proper tech geek would do: I started changing and resetting all my graphics settings :)
Screenshot from the TV show The IT Crowd in which actor Chris O’Dowd has picked up the phone and has immediately said, “Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?”.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
If you’ve been using software as complicated as Windows for long enough, you’ll know that things get missed or overwritten without warning – especially when hardware or software is being upgraded. So I figured either one of my settings got overwritten during the upgrade or the folks at Microsoft changed something in Windows that meant my current setting was no longer the correct one.
After toggling a bunch of display settings in Windows (scaling, resolution, etc), I moved onto the NVIDIA Control Panel and there’s where I found the answer.
In the ‘Display > Adjust Desktop Size and Position’ section you have the ability to scale and size your desktop.
The default setting for this is ‘Aspect ratio’.
But if your screen is scaled to 100% and you want every software-generated pixel to map to its corresponding hardware pixel on your monitor, you’re better off turning all scaling off. So that’s what I did.
I switched to ‘No scaling’ and my screen is now perfectly sharp, and all is right with the world :)
Screenshot from the NVIDIA Control Panel app on Windows. Two sections are highlighted. The first is a radio button that reads, “No scaling”. The second describes the typical usage scenario in which you apply this setting: “Your desktop appears blurry when scaled”.
Hope this helps you if you’re having the same problem I was!
[1] Intel 13th Gen CPU, NVIDIA RTX 4080 GPU, Windows 11 Pro