Windows 8 [Desktop display quality loss] after upgrading to windows 8 or after upgrdaing my graphic card

[StefaNafetS]

[Partially SOLVED][Wallpapers display quality loss] after upgrading to windows 8

Ive saw the diffreences while setting my old high quality wallpapers (1920x 1200) as background.Being used with the same wallpapers for some long I instanly noticed the differences.
I have the latest drivers

so here is a capture from the time runing winodows 7:

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and with the windows 8:


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the difference its more proeminent on the fullscreen size

Another change Ive spoted is that my desktop does not respond everytime when I click refresh. Only on 5th- 6th try.

EDIT :
I confirm : this was caused by windows 8 upgrade since Ive reinstalled my win7 and the wallpapers are displaying at their best quality.

 

[kemical]

Hi,

I think the difference your seeing on the Win 8 desktop is due to the lack of Aero. The GUI of Win 8 doesn't have the same type of 'pretties' introduced under win vista and improved on under win 7. This is because Win 8 is an os for more than one platform some of which cannot handle Aero.

 

[VegasGuy]

I've noticed differences in loss of performance under Win 8 from Win 7 with my graphics card. Through reinstalling graphics heavy programs and driver updates I've managed to get some back, though I'm not completely satisfied with performance. I'm hoping that as Nvidia works on the drivers for 8 I will see the performance gains I should be seeing as I have just upgraded this card. I've actually turned off many display features to compensate for the time being. Also I was going to put the old card back in my older system where it worked fine under 7, but now, when I install it the graphics on Windows 8 are glitchy and/or it just plain shuts the monitor off right on boot up. One time I got the card to stay on long enough to install the updated driver for the card and Win 8 and on reboot the monitor just shut off so MSFT really has some work to do. I know the card isn't too old because I'm using a 9800 GT in it right now and it is an old card and it works fine. So kemical might be right, it could just be lack of Aero, or it could be more crap that MSFT needs to fix in this Win 8 mess The latter gets my vote

 

[StefaNafetS]

and what about the refresh problem? Is this typical to windows 8? IS the disply refreshing even the shortcuts do not wink , only after the 5 -6 try?

 

[kemical]

Refresh problem?

Not heard of any issues regarding this. As for Windows 8 graphics and GUI, it's actually more advanced than Windows 7. The WDDM (windows display driver) has been updated to 1.2 from 1.1 this is why some cards are not supported. For those cards that are supported though Windows 8 has a fresh, vibrant feel with games looking extremely nice. I must admit to noticing the improvements almost straight away and I've been using win 8 since the get go.
The only thing I would suggest is make sure your install is a clean or custom one. Upgrades just don't cut it and your far, far better off wiping clean and installing to a empty drive. Once you installed the os, run windows update making sure no drivers are installed. Once updated then find the latest versions for your drivers. This means all your drivers not just audio and graphics. I've been using Windows 8 (as well as win 7, vista, xp, 98) this way since it was released and it runs just fine.

 

[StefaNafetS]

Well Ive done a clean install of windows 8 so dont think thats tyhe problem. So Im guessing you have windows8. Can you see if your display responds everytime you click refresh?

Ive reinstalled windows 7 and indeed this display issue is caused by windows 8. The wallpapers are again shinny and at their best quality winth windows 7

 

[kemical]

Hi,

Refresh works fine..

This web page may interest you:

Change a Master Boot Record Disk into a GUID Partition Table Disk

 

[StefaNafetS]

I will opened another thread for [Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks]

 

[StefaNafetS]

I will open another topic for this [Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks]

 

[VegasGuy]

Well so after reading over and over that doing a clean install of Windows 8 will make all right in the world, ect, I did that to my older system to see if the GT 440 graphics card would work in there, since it worked perfectly on Win 7. So after losing EVERYTHING in this attempt it still doesn't work. I really find it hard to believe a GT 9800 that is 4 or 5 years old works and a 440 which is only a year or two doesn't. So not only is Windows 8 not any better than it was before I lost everything. I get to put it all back now. What a freekin joy!!!

 

[kemical]

Hi,

@ Stefanafets,

Looking good. That's how it's supposed to look. Even if you re-installed and deleted those partitions win 8 would create them again. This is because they are needed for stuff like hidden files and system restore points.

@ Vegasguy,

As I explained above, Graphic cards need to be WDDM 1.2 capable to be compatible with Windows 8. AMD does a have legacy driver for the 4 series and below although I'm unsure if Nvidia has released anything yet for it's older cards.
The oldest supported cards I could find was the 5 series..

 

[StefaNafetS]

and what about I cant set any partition as active one?
And why the 1st time I installed window 7 on my PC ( having the same partitions) I could install it in C without that message and without the need to delete all my partition?
Anyway I guess this issue will reapear If I create new partitions again ( I intend to do that wirh Easeus) so I wonder what are the benefits of having more than one partition ( there are some notable improvements ?)

 

[kemical]

I don't understand your need to mark any partitions as active? They are all in effect 'active' as Windows 8 needs them to run. I see you removed your screenshot so unfortunately I cannot view your set up again but regardless you need those partitions. See my post above as to why they are needed.

 

[StefaNafetS]

well I saw some glitches when I start/restart my pc. After motherboard screen with those option to setup bios , enter q flash, boot menu etc its covered PARTIALLY with a black screen where that spining dot circle of windows 8 working.and it takes abit more time than before to boot dsiplaying the lock screen. The same for restart whwre it also takes a bit longer and again that black screen overlapping partially the motherboard screen.

 

[kemical]

That sounds like a normal boot. Mine does the same. The initial boot screen appears with the options to enter bios etc then a black screen appears followed by another screen displaying storage, another black screen and then the lock screen (although mine now boots straight to the start menu).
Restart always takes longer than a booting up as all services are stopped and restarted again. Where as with a shutdown a 'snapshot' is taken of the system settings and just reapplied on booting up.

 

[StefaNafetS]

hey you can delete all these offtopic onverastions now that Ive opened another topic on that.!!!

And I found the solution to the wallappers quality loss with windows 8.

It seems this is the way windows 8 deals with non PNG formats like JPG or BMP. So you need to convert them to PNG to no lose quality. Tough I cannot figured how to do these in case of wallpapers that come with themes.

I strongly recommend to move this somewhere to be broadly visible as is an important aspect of windows 8 appearance.!!!

 

[kemical]

I'm unsure as to how you have your machine set up as I do not see any loss of quality whether jpeg, png or bitmap. I use Paint.Net too to manipulate digital images and regardless of file type they all look as good as each other on the monitor.

 

[StefaNafetS]

it seems this is a quite a common problem but most of us dont give a*** on the appearance. In fact Its not me who found these solution. Its on other windows 8 forums whree peoples also reported my problem.

What kind of monitor do you have ? People Ive talking about they were al having widescreen monitors

 

[StefaNafetS]

I think I found why this happens with windows 8
Im quoting someone from other win8 forum:

"It is possible that windows compresses ALL file formats for wallpapers as when I go to C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles my wallpaper despite now being a PNG file has been changed to a JPEG file of a much smaller size. So windows is still compressing the PNG files but the quality isn't as poor. It is likely that when someone uses a JPEG as a wallpaper, because of the already poor quality of the jpeg it gets further compressed and a low quality wallpaper results (kinda like a double effect). HOWEVER, I used to use JPEGs in windows 7 and they weren't compressed so much. SO maybe in windows 8, MS has decided to increase compression of the cached file/transcoded wallpaper?"

 

[kemical]

Yeah my monitor isn't the best quality just a cheapo LCD but still.. I'd have thought I'd have noticed the difference unless it's only particular to wide screen?