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  1. JDK
  2. JDK-6311320

Swing applications are blank or blurry when fullscreen-AA is enabled in video card settings

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    • 2d
    • b01
    • x86
    • windows_xp

    Description

      This bug has been filed elswhere; I am opening up this new bug report to avoid the confusion of the previous closed bugs.

      In particular, see bugs 6267861 (closed as a dup) and 6213204.

      The main issue is this:
      Some users have tweaked the display control panel settings for their graphics chip to force-enable fullscreen anti-aliasing for all Direct3D applications. This setting is disabled by default (the setting is usually "application controlled"), but can be manually adjusted by the user. It is theoretically possible that games could also force-enable this unbeknownst to the user, but we have no way of knowing now whether this has happend; we'll just assume the users have adjusted the setting manually.

      When this setting has been enabled, _all_ Direct3D applications end up rendering with "fullscreen anti-aliasing". This means that Swing, too, uses this setting. This has two possible outcomes in Swing applications:
      - Some applications have correct content, but that content is blurry. What the user sees is that the entire desktop will become blurry as soon as the Swing application is launched. The contents of all of the applications will be correct, but the text will be so blurry as to be unreadable, or at least painful to read.
      - Sometimes the overall desktop is not affected, but Swing applications come up with a blank screen.
      The times that I saw the 'blurry' desktop effect, I was using a setting that does not appear to exist on my ATI Radeon 9700; the setting was "2xQ AA" (detailed in the evaluation of 6213204). On my Radeon card, I just see the blank-window effect when any of the 2x/4x/6x settings are chosen in the Direct3D tab of the Advanced dialog in the display control panel settings.

      The reason for the next bug report is that the root issue, our use of Direct3D, has been "fixed" in Mustang; we no longer enable Direct3D by default. This means that most users (especially those using the control panel, as originally reported in 6267861) will never see this problem because we do not trigger the Direct3D situation that causes it.
      However, we should still fix this problem in older releases, such as the 5.0 update releases. Since Direct3D is enabled by default in those releases, users will see this problem if they happen to have the display control panel settings changed as noted here.

      Note: The best fix for this problem is for users to change their display control panel settings to be "Application perference" for Direct3D anti-aliasing; there is no good reason to force this on for all Direct3D applications, and will cause problems for any or all applications that happen to use Direct3D (like Swing). Having said, that we should fix the problem for those users that continue to have this switch enabled (maybe because they do not realize it's been changed).

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              chaasesunw Chet Haase (Inactive)
              chaasesunw Chet Haase (Inactive)
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