Anti-Aliasing only works at 2x, not 4x or 6x

[honda346]

ATI Radeon 9500
Catalyst 4.5 (current latest driver package 8.01-040421a-015419C)

Setting to 2x shows that level of anti-aliasing in AH2.
Changing to 4x or 6x has no anti-aliasing effect happening at all.  Frame rate doesn't reflect any difference either.

[Octavius]

ditto:  http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=119615

[honda346]

I'm now at Catalyst 4.6 but that isn't the issue...

HiTech was right in that it has something to do with running out of video memory on the card.  I went in with 4x AA 4X AF at 1024 textures and it didn't work.  Came out, changed to 512 textures and it worked fine (also showed vid mem at 70M/128M used).

However, it is flaky at best per what Oct mentioned in another thread.  I left, went back to 1024 textures and now it works again even though is shows vidmem maxed. It isn't consistent.

Regardless, I don't get why it wouldn't simply spill over to system memory and not completely shut down fullscreen AA...

Anyone know how much visual effect you lose not having 1024 textures?  In Nascar 2003 it's a huge difference between car textures...

[hitech]

honda, changing back to 1024 did not nesacarly use all your video memory. If you change texture sizes you cache folder is completly cleaned. It then can take a while flying before you see all the textures that that you had previously. But the next time you start it will also load these on start up.


Also the vidmem display shows only onboard memory, there is also some agp memory treated as texture memory. (aces high dosn't control this) which is slower to access then onbord memory. So even thow you show out of memory, there still could be some free.

In the next patch we are making a change that if you go above the default texture size, it will no longer preload all textures. It apears that the load from cache is now quick enof to not cause studders. So the preoload is not always needed. This will lower your normal texture usage to fit into a 128 meg board. We will see well it works in todays patch.

[Octavius]

Awesome!  Thanks HT.  I cannot live without FSAA.

So, with the existance of other AGP memory, why would AH or the vid card disable AA if it is outside of AH's control?  Still learning here... but I would assume AA would only be disabled if it was set to 'application preference.'  ah well

[dracon]

Hmm.....Clarification here plz!

System:
1.7 GHz ABIT TH7-II MoBo, Intel 850 Chipset
512 M RDRAM 400 FSB
ATI Radeon 9600XT with Omega CAT 4.5 drivers
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card, TBSC-4193 drivers
3 Com NIC
Cable 3.0M/300kbs
CH HOTAS and Pedals all USB
XP Pro SP-1a

Game:
All default settings for Video: 512 Textures, 1152X864 (Same as Desktop) FSAA X4, AF Application Preference.

Questions:

1.  Should I try 1024 Textures?  If so why?

2.  Should I turn down FSAA to X2 as X4 and X6 don't work?

3.  What drivers are the best to use?
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
Other?

Thanks, Hope this may help others too?

[WilldCrd]

whats AA and FSAA do anyway?

[Octavius]

FSAA = AA = full screen anti-aliasing.  Have you ever noticed diagonal edges are rather jagged and have a stairs-like appearance?  Antialiasing decreases their jaggedness and attempts to smooth out the 'stairs'.  Gives MUCH better picture quality at a cost of a few frames per second.  The greater the setting (2x, 4x, 6x), the less jaggy your edges are

I cannot live without AA

[honda346]

Thanks again for the reply HiTech... I've been out of town so I am just now getting your reply.  I'll test the newest version of course and see how it goes.

I'm curious though as to why AA would be an "all or nothing" proposition even if it does go beyond both on board memory and AGP available...  I'm sure this is outside of Aces per se anyway, and even more, I don't get why textures would load "aliased vs non-aliased" either.  In essence I don't see why larger textures and the resulting memory usage/overage would cause the anti-aliasing to stop working all together when the threshold is reached.  I would have simply expected slower performance while the swapping to slower memory or hard drive virtual memory occurred...

[AKIron]

Mine didn't work until I set AA to 2X and textures to 256, then it started working so I cranked it back up to 6X and texture size 1024. Still works, YMMV.

[Overlag]

not enough gfx card memory thats why

[Squire]

We are in serious need of a "Radeon FAQ" for AHII imho. For those of us (like me) who have one but are not tech heads.

Im scowering differnet threads trying to figure out settings, as im sure many others are.