Anti Aliasing : Works now?

[Reality]

i remember when i first purchased FFXI, and was pissed off to find that I was unable to actually use any of the 3d features of my card (Anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering) without modifying the registry and basically super sampling all the textures for a sort of rigged anti aliasing effect

well I was jacking around with the new catalyst drivers for my card (ati 9800 (flashed to a pro)) and noticed that whenever i turned the AA features on (AA, Temporal AA, or Adaptive AA), my framerates in FFXI would actually drop noticably, which leads me to believe that they are actually affecting the visuals in the game, which they have not done for the past 2 and a half years

has anyone else noticed this? i took some uncompressed (PNG) screenshots with the AA features on and off, unfortunately since the graphics in this game basically suck, i can't really eye-ball it if the AA features are actually making my game look better or not

[Alleya]

Turning on AA has always raped performance without actually changing anything. Thanks shitty PS2 port!

[Lordwafik]

i remember when i first purchased FFXI, and was pissed off to find that I was unable to actually use any of the 3d features of my card (Anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering) without modifying the registry and basically super sampling all the textures for a sort of rigged anti aliasing effect

well I was jacking around with the new catalyst drivers for my card (ati 9800 (flashed to a pro)) and noticed that whenever i turned the AA features on (AA, Temporal AA, or Adaptive AA), my framerates in FFXI would actually drop noticably, which leads me to believe that they are actually affecting the visuals in the game, which they have not done for the past 2 and a half years

has anyone else noticed this? i took some uncompressed (PNG) screenshots with the AA features on and off, unfortunately since the graphics in this game basically suck, i can't really eye-ball it if the AA features are actually making my game look better or not

It's always worked, so long as you did it from the registry and not via the FFXI Config.

[Reality]

i remember when i first purchased FFXI, and was pissed off to find that I was unable to actually use any of the 3d features of my card (Anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering) without modifying the registry and basically super sampling all the textures for a sort of rigged anti aliasing effect

well I was jacking around with the new catalyst drivers for my card (ati 9800 (flashed to a pro)) and noticed that whenever i turned the AA features on (AA, Temporal AA, or Adaptive AA), my framerates in FFXI would actually drop noticably, which leads me to believe that they are actually affecting the visuals in the game, which they have not done for the past 2 and a half years

has anyone else noticed this? i took some uncompressed (PNG) screenshots with the AA features on and off, unfortunately since the graphics in this game basically suck, i can't really eye-ball it if the AA features are actually making my game look better or not

It's always worked, so long as you did it from the registry and not via the FFXI Config.

yes, i believe i stated that clearly in my original post:

without modifying the registry and basically super sampling all the textures for a sort of rigged anti aliasing effect

and to the guy who replied first, i never noticed any performance abnormalities when i first enabled AA through the ATI control panel/catalyst CP back in the day, not saying it never existed.. just that I never really noticed it until today

moral of the story, PS2 made this game look like shit
ty SE

[DrObvious]

Anisotropic filtering used to work for me on my ati 9500 with old drivers.

[Suci]

Theres a framerate drop and it doesnt do anything anyway . Way i under stand it only helps with like windows or fencing type stuff to help clear it up some. Only thing i ever notice is when you change rez higher then it looks better but other then that its meh.

BF2 with max stuff really changes thing though or any none ps2 port game . They should give use a port from xbox360 and ditch the ps2 port.

[rahskala]

Halo PC has the same problem. I don't recall the technical explanation, but it has to do with the fact that both games reach directly into the pixel buffer to do some of the fancier special effects (the critical hit blurring/utsusemi casting/summoned avatar bling). As a result, it skips over the part of the rendering pipeline where FSAA is applied.

I'm sure you could find more info with some careful googling, but I don't know if it's possible to get FSAA to actually work.

[Reality]

Halo PC has the same problem. I don't recall the technical explanation, but it has to do with the fact that both games reach directly into the pixel buffer to do some of the fancier special effects (the critical hit blurring/utsusemi casting/summoned avatar bling). As a result, it skips over the part of the rendering pipeline where FSAA is applied.

I'm sure you could find more info with some careful googling, but I don't know if it's possible to get FSAA to actually work.

the Halo PC problem was fixed in a later patch i believe, and it only affected nvidia cards

i've got some awesome screenshots where I have 6xFSAA (super sampled with the new catalyst drivers), and 16xAF enabled and for being a 2-3+ year old game, the graphics are ridiculously good

[Nofriends]

Runs fine and looks good on my rig.

http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/8608/img00357vq.jpg

[Sykes]

The problem that used to exist was that FFXI renders 3D in to a buffer before it is displayed on screen, which used to completely bypass nVidia's anti-aliasing (I believe that ATI's anti-aliasing still worked, which is probably because previous-generation ATI cards use supersampling exclusively, whereas previous-generation nVidia cards use multisampling exclusively). Current generation cards from both vendors use a mix of multisampling and supersampling in the default antialiasing modes.

I could be wrong, but I believe that ATI and nVidia adjusted their drivers to accomodate for the way games like FFXI render 3D so that antialiasing, etc. works properly.

[Reality]

Runs fine and looks good on my rig.

http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/8608/img00357vq.jpg

certain aspects of FFXI do look good, if not great, mainly the level of detail on PC/NPC graphics, i.e. Armor/Clothing, the way a monster's skin looks, etc.

but other aspects look like complete ass, mainly terrain detail and sprite graphics (i.e. 2D objects)

http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/7...opretty6vx.jpg

resized to 1024 (originally 1280), but this was with maxed CP settings (6xAA super sampled, 16x AF)

notice the detail of the beach sand, the texture detail is amazing when you compare it to what the ground looks like in FFXI, even when you set the texture resolution through the registry up to like 2048x2048

[TheLegendaryCravy]

Runs fine and looks good on my rig.

http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/8608/img00357vq.jpg

certain aspects of FFXI do look good, if not great, mainly the level of detail on PC/NPC graphics, i.e. Armor/Clothing, the way a monster's skin looks, etc.

but other aspects look like complete ass, mainly terrain detail and sprite graphics (i.e. 2D objects)

http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/7...opretty6vx.jpg

resized to 1024 (originally 1280), but this was with maxed CP settings (6xAA super sampled, 16x AF)

notice the detail of the beach sand, the texture detail is amazing when you compare it to what the ground looks like in FFXI, even when you set the texture resolution through the registry up to like 2048x2048

go run F.E.A.R. on max settings. Halo is a shit test for testing if your rig can do anything. FFXI originally designed to run on PS2. they just lowered settings for it and put it on the ps2 then gave PC users the option to increase the resolution of textures. thats why it looks like shit.

[rahskala]

notice the detail of the beach sand, the texture detail is amazing when you compare it to what the ground looks like in FFXI, even when you set the texture resolution through the registry up to like 2048x2048

Increasing the resolution that textures are rendered at can't change the source material. It's like taking a 300x200 image and resizing it to 1200x800. FFXI could use some higher-resolution textures, IMO. The newer stuff is better than what was in the original version of the game, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

[Reality]

go run F.E.A.R. on max settings. Halo is a shit test for testing if your rig can do anything. FFXI originally designed to run on PS2. they just lowered settings for it and put it on the ps2 then gave PC users the option to increase the resolution of textures. thats why it looks like shit.

well FEAR is a high end DX9 game, so of course it will have the potential to look better than Halo which is a slightly modified port from the Xbox version (which of course is a DX8 game)

but yeah, FEAR looks awesome when you put it up against HaloPC (it was a great game too, I beat it about 5-6 months ago, didn't really like the ending though but I guess they're making a sequel)

[Priran]

go run F.E.A.R. on max settings. Halo is a shit test for testing if your rig can do anything. FFXI originally designed to run on PS2. they just lowered settings for it and put it on the ps2 then gave PC users the option to increase the resolution of textures. thats why it looks like shit.

well FEAR is a high end DX9 game, so of course it will have the potential to look better than Halo which is a slightly modified port from the Xbox version (which of course is a DX8 game)

Halo is a PC game, Bungie was bought by Microsoft shortly after announcing Halo for PC in 1999, etc

[Reality]

go run F.E.A.R. on max settings. Halo is a shit test for testing if your rig can do anything. FFXI originally designed to run on PS2. they just lowered settings for it and put it on the ps2 then gave PC users the option to increase the resolution of textures. thats why it looks like shit.

well FEAR is a high end DX9 game, so of course it will have the potential to look better than Halo which is a slightly modified port from the Xbox version (which of course is a DX8 game)

Halo is a PC game, Bungie was bought by Microsoft shortly after announcing Halo for PC in 1999, etc

yes, but most of the development put into Halo was done for the Xbox hardware, if i recall the very first build of Halo for PC (before MS purchased Bungie) was only about 15% complete