Anisotropic Filtering in IL-2

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

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.

[Les]

Originally Posted by EJGr.Ost_Caspar

You need to set AA-mode to supersampling and use either 8x or higher, or SSAA won't work with newer Nvidia cards...

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.

[Flanker35M]

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

[julian265]

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.

[zaelu]

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.

[JAMF]

Originally Posted by zaelu

It seems to be from filtering and not antialiasing.

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.

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

Originally Posted by Flanker35M

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 will. Too bad, nHancer is getting lost.

[zaelu]

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?

[Flanker35M]

S!

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

[Les]

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 ).