You often won't notice a difference between 8x AA and 4x AA. Ought to be possible to see a difference between 2x AA and other AA options though. I personally feel that 2x AA is often a barely-helpful setting, not always an aesthetic improvement. (There is no such thing as 1x AA).
One important thing has changed about anti-aliasing since a few years ago - especially compared, for example, to what we were used to with IL-2 1946. Sorry if I don't describe this completely accurately... Pixel shaders break AA. Traditional AA is designed to smooth areas of the screen containing polygon edges. With older games, including IL-2 1946, polygon edges were all you had. Nowadays there are all sorts of shading effects being done to much of what is on screen, and traditional multisample antialiasing (MSAA) simply can't antialias any of this. This is an issue with many modern games.
You may notice that if you turn on, say, 4x MSAA in the game's menus, and fly over the sea, that the edge of your aircraft (in external views) is antialiased. But the surface of the sea below won't be - there'll be those bitty white spots for light glinting on wave edges, rather than softer smoother glints of light.
When the ATI 5870 graphics cards were released a feature was enabled - SSAA (Super sample anti-aliasing). For some vague technical reasons it could only be applied to directx 9 games (not 10+). It is intended to solve the increasing ineffectiveness of MSAA, by antialiasing the entire image "properly" including pixel shaded stuff. And it works, but it has a massive performance impact and (as mentioned) only works in DX9 mode games. I haven't tried switching to CoD's DX9 mode to see what SSAA does, as performance is bad enough for me already! :)
An example screenshot showing the difference between no AA, MSAA and SSAA in modern games can be seen here:
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?im...8xMV9sLnBuZw==
If you don't spot the difference between MSAA and SSAA it immediately, look at the guy's hair and the white lights on his backpack. The lights are not antialiased at all, using MSAA, because pixel shaders are being applied.
There's another thing. Some kind of fancy effect is being done when you are at very low altitude over water. Which produces a kind of white glow/edging around the boundaries where your wing stops and the sea begins. Again, this is pixel shader gubbins.
For me, 4x MSAA appears to be working as well as it is able to in any modern, shader-heavy game.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ARGH
(Post 250326)
i think 4x msaa is the max the game allows. after setting the aa to 8x, i looked into the conf.ini file and it reads 4x msaa.
so this is probably the reason.
|
The way the AA setting is written in the conf.ini is misleading. I don't think it directly corresponds, number to number, to the antialiasing value you select in the game's menus. I have set 4x antialiasing in the game's menus and the conf.ini setting is "MSAA=3". I suspect that MSAA=4 is 8x AA. So the number you see in the conf.ini is an arbitrary name for an AA option.
