But subpixel AA is futile in my opinion. It was a nice hack in the aughts when we had 72dpi monitors, but on modern "retina" screens it's imperceptible. And for a teeny tiny improvement, you get many drawbacks:
- it only works over opaque backgrounds
- can't apply any effect on the rasterized results (e.g. resizing, mirroring, blurring, etc.)
- screenshots look bad when viewed on a different display
This isn't just legacy hardware; 96dpi monitors and notebooks are still being produced today.
On my rarely used Windows partition, I have used ClearType Tuner (name?) to set up ClearType to my preferences. The results are still somewhat grainy and thin, but that's a general property of Windows font rendering.
- A protocol to ask the hardware
- A database of quirks about hardware that is known to provide wrong information
- A user override for when neither of the previous options do the job