I see a big difference in graphics quality when I use Radeon software to override application settings and set my own values Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering.
I did find the culprit this morning though. It's a setting called "Morphological Filtering". If I enable it, the text looks terrible. With MF disabled, its fine. I think this problem has probably been here all along, i.e. I don't think it was "fixed" at one point only to be broken by a subsequent patch. More likely it disappeared as a result of me playing with the card's settings and disabling MF. I go back and forth between higher and lower settings depending whether I'm skinning or playing.
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