Disappointing font rendering with ATI graphics card
 

I'm using an AMD Athlon64 machine running Suse 10.0 with an AGP graphics card, ATI Radeon 9250 chipset (but YaST identifies it as ATI RV280 5960). Font rendering (in both Gnome and KDE) is unpleasant - it seems 'gritty'. The video display is fine apart from this, but the fonts are not nearly as good as they appear on an Intel machine with onboard Intel 845G graphics - using the same LCD monitor. It's the same story on both machines with Ubuntu and Fedora 4. Also, the four choices in Gnome Control Centre/Fonts make absolutely no visible difference (in the AMD Suse 10 setup).

It's a bit of a bummer because I'm a writer and word-processing is my most important application, and I assembled the AMD machine especially for Linux.

Are there any tweaks I can employ - the Graphics card option settings in YaST make no sense to me. If not, does anyone have any comments about ATI cards and font rendering. I've read that ATI are not as good as Nvidia at keeping their Linux drivers up to date, but would that affect font rendering? 3D acceleration is not important to me. I didn't really want to buy another card but will if I can be sure the fonts will be better.

This is the output from /sbin/lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 0204
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. K8M800 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800/K8T890 Sout h]
00:0a.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Control ler (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/ C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T89 0 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 A C97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
00:13.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller ( rev 80)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTra nsport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Con troller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscella neous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (rev 01)

And this is the contents of ~/.fonts.conf :

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
<const>hintfull</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const></const>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Many thanks in advance. Oh, and by the way, I did use the search facility, but the only relevant (and informative) post I could find was specifically to do with Slackware.