I have an update and a further question. I installed the latest drivers on my ATI 8500 and nothing changed, the bitmaps still looked terrible as if they were dithered to 256 colours.

I went to the screen properties and played around with the OpenGL settings, when I switched the "Texture Preference" to "high quality" the dithering problem dissapears, a lower setting and the problem returns.

I decided to try these settings on my ATI 9700 pro. However, the dithering problem did not occur even when I switched off all the quality settings.

So it seems to be related to the quality setting of the textures. If this is the case is there a command I can use to force my app to the use the highest Texture Quality setting by passing whatever has been chosen in the control panel?

Can anyone suggest a command or way to achieve this?