Does the desktop look much worse after upgrading to windows 8.1

Ok, figured it out. After I've enabled Anti-Aliasing (either MFAA, MSAA or SSAA) on my graphics card for a particular process (e.g. MassEffect2.exe) the App Store (and all Apps, except the Start Menu) have this effect.

So basically, for whatever reason, the AMD Catalyst program is applying AA to the App Store once it's been used by a game. It does this until I reset my computer. Clearly the App Store must be using D3D, even though it looks two dimension in its presentation.

So I guess it's some sort of bug with the AMD Catalyst software, but whatever the reason, at least I know what causes it, and how to fix it!

I solved the issue myself after a lot of testing.

As it turns out, the Setup.exe that AMD gives you doesn't always actually install the graphics driver. It installs the Install Manager, CCC, and the HDMI Audio driver, but not the graphics drivers. Below I'll lay out the steps for solving this:

• Open the device manager and select your Graphics Card in the Display Adapters group.

• Right click on it and select "Update Driver Software..."

• Select "Browse my computer for driver software"

• Select "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"

  • This will allow you to select the driver you want to use from a list of the compatible drivers.
  • Below is an example picture: Number 1 is the correct driver that should be installed by what you download from AMD. Number 2 is the driver that gets obtained from Windows Update.
    Number 3 is a generic driver that windows uses for compatibility with most graphics cards without the need for third party drivers.

• If the correct driver is there, just select it and hit "Next" and you should be done, if it's not there (it wasn't for me) then go to the next step.

• The drivers files should be on your computer already, extracted to a folder by the executable downloaded from AMD. AMD extracts them to C:\AMD\Support by default. Look there and see if you see a folder with a name like 13-4_vista_win7_win8_64_dd_ccc_whql. If it's not there, just run the executable for the drivers downloaded from AMD again, the first step that executable does is extract the files into the directory I listed above.

• Once you make sure the driver files are on your computer go back to the screen where you selected "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer" before. Once you're at that screen, select "Browse...". Then just browse to the location your drivers are in and select the folder with a name like 13-4_vista_win7_win8_64_dd_ccc_whql then hit OK. Then hit Next.

• That will manually install the drivers that CCC didn't install by itself. Now all you have to do is restart your computer and everything should be fixed. In the event that it's not just go back to that step that allowed you to select the driver you want to use and select the correct one.

I'm not sure why the setup doesn't automatically install the drivers but using this guide you can install them manually and then all the tools, including CCC will work properly.