Anisotropic Filtering in IL-2
 

Hello...

This problem "tortures" me for quite a while and I still haven't found a solution.

Description/reproduction of the problem:

I have a GF 460GTX card (old one was a 8800GT) a 3GHzs C2D (non OC), 4GB ram, Win 7 config and I am running the game "at max settings" with the latest drivers configured for high quality image, 8xAA and 8xAF at 1920x1080 resolution.

Almost any plane but especially those with similar cockpits like A-20 have a ugly rescaling problem of cockpit gauges. Meaning when I am zoomed back furthest I can't read the gauges cause instead of filtering resize the game apparently only make rescaling by simple interpolation... destroying the image. If I zoom in... no problem... the gauges are exquisite beautiful and quite sharp.

Anyone else have the same problem?

Here are two screenshots to exemplify my problem and a quote of my conf.ini

crop from full image at 1920x1080

cockpit gauges of A20
http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/8609/grab0000.jpg

icons on map that have strange square artifacts at transparency around the aircraft sign... like in no filtering or something.
http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/8353/grab00010.jpg

and the full versions... jpg... originally they were TGA
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/5...0000big.th.jpg http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/381...0001big.th.jpg

put AA and AF at x16 in the nvidia control panel, and have it set to override application settings.

also, soomed out view isn't actually representative of correct field of view, i believe that fov35 is most representative.

Thank you for your answer Titus, I will try those settings.

Also, regarding the FOV... I observed that as FOV increases the filtering get's worse... I would expect it would stay the same for the whole game no mater the zoom/FOV setting.

True... I have an enlarged FOV to 106° (max) through an external mean to fit the view on my 16/9 monitor. same thing I think happens for triple head view users that are "officially" supported.

I get the same aliasing effect on the cockpit gauges in wide angle view, and with the little plane icon on the map.

I'm using a GTX285 with 16xAF & 8xQAA at the moment, but the image has always been like that as far as I can rememeber, with other cards and settings too. Tried 16xAA and it didn't make any difference.

If you zoom in on the gauges and look at where a white needle or pointer crosses over another white marking you can see a black edge to it that's aliased even in the closest zoomed in view. This doesn't get corrected when you go into a wider view, and so the dials and number just become messed up. I don't think there's a video-setting that can correct it, it's just that the dials themselves are made with too low a resolution.

If you memorize roughly where the needles and pointers should be pointing, you can still guess your speed and altitude etc. while in wide view without actually being able to read the numbers. When I want to see them in more detail, I just zoom in and tell myself it's like leaning forward in the cockpit to look closer.

Hopefully BOB will have all these guages and dials and pointers made with a higher resolution so we don't have to do that anymore. They should just get smaller but still be readable using a wider angle view, not get smaller and then distorted because of their original blockiness.

At the same time, compromises have to be made and there is a limit to how readable these things can be when depicted on a computer monitors screen. When using the widest angle view, you really should be using a projector to blow the image up to life-size scale. If not, it's actually the compressing of the size of the image down to fit onto your monitor that makes things hard to read/see.

I actually tested out IL-2 on a projector once, measuring the cockpit gauges so that they they were life-size when using wide-angle view and placed the same distance from my seating position that they would be in real life. It was @#@%ing amazing. But! Everything was too blurry when blown up like that, because of the low resoution of the projector, and the low resolution of the image itself as described above, so...

Until many many years from now when the in-game art and the means of viewing it have improved enough, I guess we're stuck with using narrower fields of view and/or zooming in a lot.

You need to set AA-mode to supersampling and use either 8x or higher, or SSAA won't work with newer Nvidia cards. Before the 8800 series and respectivly drivers came out, SSAA did work on lower AA settings too. No idea, why Nvidia changed that.

You can get better results (more options than normal Forceware driver menue) with a nice tool, called 'nHancer'.
Also Rivatuner could show more options.

I was going to mention 'nHancer' myself as I already use it and can recommend it. Just had a look at the supersampling options in the main AA section though, and it says it only works for directX applications, and the highest setting was 4x4.

I do already have supersampling ticked in the Transparency AA section though, with 8xQ multisampling in the main Anti-aliasing options. No luck with that.

S!

nHancer is pretty much discontinued. Nvidia Inspector is a new tool done by a guy that has a lot of options to tweak things. For example Rage3D or Guru3D have the links to it, worth giving a try. I am still tweaking IL-2 to run on the 580GTX ;)

I always had trouble reading the A20's gauges in wide view mode, with both 4870 and 9800GTX+. I never used much AA though, by preference.

What I noticed is that high rez gauges (those from mod packs for example) have same or even worse filtering effect. For example the FW with 1024x1024 texture size in every gauge is worse than that with 512. Cause instead of filtering when doing a downsize is making simple resizing with interpolation.

It seems to be from filtering and not antialiasing. If is antialiasing is the transparency antialiasing that I believe doesn't work more than multisampling in IL-2... IRC.

IIRC the dials have a filtering type assigned to them. People complained about the shimmering and readability of some of the dials, so someone changed something to (activate?) mipmapping.

Use 'Multisampling/Supersampling combined'. I cannot name it correctly now, as I do not have it installed currently.


EDIT: with combined, you can even antialiase the river edges (flickering).

I will. Too bad, nHancer is getting lost.

how is possible tu use them combined? in my driver they are on a drop down list... is either one or the other.

with a tool?

S!

I think Caspar meant the nHancer tool where you can do this. On NV control panel you can not do this.

Thanks for the tips guys.

I downloaded NVIDIA Inspector 1.9.4.2.

Tried a lot of different settings and found IL-2 wouldn't load up to the menu screen a lot of times, it'd just flash Il-2's main menu then crash back to desktop and I'd have to use Windows Task Manager to shut it down. Sometimes on repeated tries the settings would stick and sometimes they wouldn't. I don't know why, but I've seen that sort of thing before when adjusting driver settings so I just put it down to the temperamental nature of such things. I wouldn't blame it on the 'NVIDIA Inspector' program itself, which I found to be a good program, well set out and easy to use, with lots of settings available to adjust. I'll still keep 'nHancer' installed as it has some other features I might use, but 'NVIDIA Inspector' is definitely a keeper.

In terms of the settings themselves, changing the Antialiasing setting to '8xSQ [Combined: 2x2 SS + 2x MS]' was enough to practically eliminate the jaggies on the cockpit instrument dials, while still giving me about 40-50fps looking at the panel, and 30-40fps looking around outside the plane.

However, with a GTX285 and using my preferred in-game settings, my frame-rate drops to the mid-teens over the more graphically demanding terrain (eg. over palm trees on the Pacific Islands QMB map). So, I'll probably just stick to jaggy old 8xQ AA and getting 40-60fps everywhere. I couldn't find a lower setting or combination of settings than '8xSQ [Combined: 2x2 SS + 2x MS]' that would fix the aliasing on the cockpit dials.

Anyway, thanks again, now I've got a way to get higher quality screenshots, and another way to justify upgrading my video-card (damn it :grin:).

Yes, I meant nHancer. But Nvidia Inspector can do it just as fine... but only with latest drivers. Thanks again for that suggestion!

@Les... I have an 9800GT, but I get the same framerates as you with 8xS. But I use stock game, so maybe any mods influence framerate? BTW, I use to set Anisotrophic filtering to OFF, as I do not see such a big impact on eyecandy like with Antialiasing. So I grab a few more frames.

Hm... I had a lot of similar problems lately and I didn't used the "inspector". I guess there is a relation between tweaking the video driver and the IL-2 suddenly failing to start.

I will investigate. I have some starting points.

No mods, using the GeForce 260.99 WHQL drivers.

I usually have Anisotropic filtering on and set to 16X because it's frame-rate impact is minimal and it sharpens up the grass runways to one consistent level. Without it I'd look down the runway and there'd be a solid block of softened grass textures up ahead, moving away from me as I approached it, or towards me as I moved away from it. Thing is, that effect seems to be greatly reduced now anyway with Antialiasing set to '8xSQ [Combined: 2x2 SS + 2x MS]'. It's still there as I come in to land on the runway, but I think I can put up with it.

Anyway, I went back and turned off Anisotropic filtering altogether just to have a look, and pretty much got my normal frame-rates back! In some places that added up to about 20fps regained (from 17fps to 38fps)!

But just as much as turning off the Anisotropic filtering helped boost framerates, in one case (in the Hurricane), turning off the mirrors gave me up to 20(!) more fps. I'm sure they, Anisotropic and mirrors, never used to have that much of an impact just using 8xQ Multisampling.

Whatever the case, for me, it's worth losing the mirrors and Anisotropic filtering just to have anti-aliasing working on the cockpit gauges, while still getting playable frame-rates over stuff like palm trees on the islands. The mirrors were just ornamental and I see much more of the cockpit gauges than I do of the things Anisotropic filtering now effects.

I did some of my testing in the F4U and the difference in the way the gauges look without all the jaggies is huge. There is still some minor aliasing going on, but there's no going back from here. For me, this kind of improvement in image quality ranks right up there with the way IL-2 Mat replaces the default aircraft insignia with better looking ones. This info should be stickied somewhere and made common knowledge for all.

I've got to say again though, it's an absolute pain in the arse trying to get these setting changes to stick sometimes. I couldn't even Alt+Tab out of the game and get back into it again, Il-2 would just flash up then crash back to desk-top again and refuse to respond to normal closing down.

I do seem to be able to exit and restart, and Alt+Tab in and out of it as normal now though, as long as I don't adjust anything inbetween. So I seem to be set up okay.

Thanks again, Il-2's never looked better.

Never saw any difference there - I just thought, that it was normal like that.
Will try to change it.


Thats quite natural. Mirrors have been always a 'fps-drag queen' on my systems. Also AA makes heaviest framerates dropping at places with transparent objects, especially with many layers of transp. objects (like clouds, smoke etc.) You can have 50fps normal, but when a plane in front of you is starting, frames drop to 15fps! I always have to wait untill the dust is settled in front of me. :rolleyes:


IMHO settings shouldn't be changable with the game running anyway, at least it should not have an impact, as the settings get loaded with the application (esp. if you use profiles, but also global).

I'm glad I could help. Tweaking the 'Old Lady' ist still a science, even after 10 years. There was a time before Oleg implemented the 'new clouds', when I could play it on a GeForce 4 with 1024x768 and 16xAA enabled.
It looked smooth as hell. :cool: