AA improvment trick

[justme262]

Hi
We're all aware the AA doesn't work very well. I was playing with the settings on my monitor today and found a "sharpness" setting. I changed sharpness down to zero and the effect was as if AA had been turned right up. I even had smooth lines for the diagonal aerial wires on the planes which usually ook very jagged even with AA turned up.
So I turned off AA in the game and Nvidia control panel and had an increase in fps.
It looks like the monitor is doing the AA and the graphics card has extra resources free for extra fps.

I tried to take a screen shot but of course it wont look the same on your monitor with sharpness set higher...

[Strike]

For me, who has Nvidia drivers and a EVGA GTX 570 HD gfx card, I got AA working by disabling ingame AA and Vsync, then manually applying it for launcher.exe in the nvidia control panel. Tried 16Q AA and V-sync with triple buffering and it works great! Reduced AA to 4x afterwards and still looks great. The only thing that isn't anti-aliased is the radio wires.

[kendo65]

Found a useful article on AA and possible problems with getting it to work on Tom's hardware:

First page:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868.html

Possible issues:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-aliasing-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon,2868-7.html

[justme262]

I'll upload a screen shot. This is with the in game set to MSAAx4, the Nvidia set to "enhance application setting" 8x and my monitor set to zero sharpness.
I not sure if you can see this but on my screen the wires are smooth. They do still go jagged from some angles but I think it is an improvement.

http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/3861/54741344.jpg

[SG1_Lud]

Mmmm nice... I have AA working from ATI control panel, but as someone said, the wire is not as smooth as yours, but at least I see is posible. Thanks for he heads up.

[Feathered_IV]

Good advice. My monitor only goes down to 1, but it improved things a little. Thanks!

[322Sqn_Dusty]

Ati here also
I've seen the antenna wires like the posted image but i can't get it back at the moment. For testing purposes, Cat 11.5 set to max settings, CoD video settings on highest and it keeps jagged as if there's no AA.

[skouras]

any word from the devs for a fix in the future:rolleyes:

[DrSanchez]

the sharpness on your monitor is likely blurring the image when set to zero. at least that's how I've seen it work on nearly every lcd I've used. it may smooth out the edges but will also blur details it's not supposed to. Proper AA doesn't do this.

On the other hand, if it works for you, who am I to say otherwise?

[janblanc]

shouldn't a too sharp image actually degrade antialiasing? i thought that a little blurness would help confuse some of those nasty jaggies?

[DrSanchez]

yes definitely. but with most lcd monitors setting sharpness to 50% (the default setting) you will get exactly what your graphics card is putting out. if you reduce sharpness i.e. add blurring, you will lose detail.

AA doesn't work like that. simply put it blends the pixels at the edge of each polygon with the background (for example) based how how much of the polygon is covering that pixel. This gives you smooth polygon edges and retains detail.