How do I finetune subpixel font anti-aliasing?

After a recent tour through Gnome3, KDE and Unity my font anti-aliasing in XFCE4 has changed in a subtle way (not sure if it was any of the DEs that changed the setting or any of the dependencies that got install when installing the DEs):

The font, Verdana 8, looks almost exactly the same, except in the old one subpixels where used to make the lines a little wider in the new one they are just one-pixel.

Which setting does cause this effect and how can I set it back? It's neither the hinting nor the subpixel ordering, which are the only settings reachable from XFCE4.

Edit: When I create a new account without any existing configuration I get the old subpixel rendering back.

Solution 1:

The difference between the two font rendering was caused by the LCD Filter setting. XFCE4 stores that setting in:

~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml

To fix my problem I deleted the whole <property name="Xft" type="empty"> section (might require to logout of XFCE4 to avoid getting the changes overwritten).

Doing a:

xfconf-query -v -c xsettings -p /Xft/Lcdfilter -s lcddefault

will also work (changes will only take effect after restarting XFCE4).