Font smoothing is wrong after Mavericks update on MacBook Pro with high-res display (not retina)

After I updated to Mavericks, the font smoothing is terrible, tried playing with the setting in system preferences (didn't restart yet) and nothing changed.

I have a 15 inch early 2011 Macbook Pro with high resolution anti-glare screen (not retina)

Here's a sample:

Here's Finder menu bar in Mountain Lion

vs Mavericks

In this example you see that the left of "F" in "File" is noticeably fuzzier in Mavericks.

The problem is all over: window bars, menu bars, web pages (Chrome & Safari), apps, etc.

Solution 1:

The system font was changed to a modified version of Lucida Grande. It was mentioned in the What's New in Cocoa presentation:

The normal Lucida Grande doesn't seem to have changed:

There is still this hidden preference for using a lighter text rendering style:

defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

Quit and reopen applications or log out and back in to apply the changes.

The regular faces of the new and old versions don't look that different, but the bold face seems to be bolder in the new version.

The screenshots posted by gooogalizer have bigger differences though, so maybe the new version is rendered in a different way on high-resolution displays, or maybe something else changed in the way text is rendered on high-resolution displays.

Solution 2:

What this means is that Apple plans to produce all of their upcoming products with retina-displays within 6 months. Mavericks is made for this feature. I updated to Mavericks as well on my new Air and it looks fuzzy. It's not fun. I suppose that'll force me to upgrade to a new one in less than a year if I want't to be able to save my eyes.