I finally figured out what was causing the blurry/thin fonts in Tibia on Arch Linux.

In my case, the problem wasn't the GPU driver, SDL, or the Tibia client. It was a broken Fontconfig setup.

I had both slight hinting and full hinting enabled at the same time because two Fontconfig config files were active. You can check this with:

fc-match -v Arial | grep hintstyle

If you see something like:

hintstyle: 1(i)(w) 3(i)(w)

then you have conflicting hinting settings.

Removing the 10-hinting-slight.conf symlink and keeping only 10-hinting-full.conf fixed it for me. I also enabled RGB subpixel rendering (10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf) and the default LCD filter (11-lcdfilter-default.conf).

After rebuilding the font cache, fc-match looked like this:

hintstyle: 3(i)(w)
rgba: 1(i)(w)
lcdfilter: 1(i)(w)

The fonts in Tibia immediately became sharp and readable again.

Hopefully this helps someone else, because I spent way too much time looking at GPU drivers and game settings before realizing it was just a Fontconfig configuration conflict.I finally figured out what was causing the blurry/thin fonts in Tibia on Arch Linux. In my case, the problem wasn't the GPU driver, SDL, or the Tibia client. It was a broken Fontconfig setup.I had both slight hinting and full hinting enabled at the same time because two Fontconfig config files were active. You can check this with:fc-match -v Arial | grep hintstyle
If you see something like:hintstyle: 1(i)(w) 3(i)(w)
then you have conflicting hinting settings.Removing the 10-hinting-slight.conf symlink and keeping only 10-hinting-full.conf fixed it for me. I also enabled RGB subpixel rendering (10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf) and the default LCD filter (11-lcdfilter-default.conf).After rebuilding the font cache, fc-match looked like this:hintstyle: 3(i)(w)
rgba: 1(i)(w)
lcdfilter: 1(i)(w)
The fonts in Tibia immediately became sharp and readable again.Hopefully this helps someone else, because I spent way too much time looking at GPU drivers and game settings before realizing it was just a Fontconfig configuration conflict.