Mavericks font rendering vs. Mountain Lion

[LostJohn]

Does anyone know why the menu fonts in Mavericks seem to look different than they did in Mountain Lion? I'm not sure if it's a placebo effect, but ML seemed to render menu text sharper on my rMBP. This is with font smoothing turn on in both cases, btw.

 

[pknz]

Potentially this:

As pointed out by Stepen Coles yesterday, Ars Technica wrote about a modified version of Lucida Grande, “optimized for Retina displays”, in their review of the new Mac OS 10.9 “Mavericks”. So, what exactly could make a font “optimized for Retina” and which modifications did Apple make?

http://blog.justanotherfoundry.com/2013/10/lucida-grande-retina-optimized-in-os-x-mavericks/