Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering thread

[halflife-bmxer]

I thought i would make a thread like this to talk about using Anti-Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF). Like what kinda grahpics card does better with these on. Also what games it is worth using on. you know questios like these. i would like this to help everyone who is new to AA and AF. So i'll start the thread with hl2 and what the AA and Af look like with it on my system and the perfomance impact.

Theirs two pictures of the main menu animation which i use to adjust the video settings.there at the bottom. Now u may say well it doesnt make a accurate way to test the fps impact but it is. Like for example i get about 20-50 fps on the game now with my settings. Which are all high,reflect world, and 4x AA and 4x AF. My system specs are in my sig. Not bad huh? Now on that menu in the pictures i get a steady 34fps on no AA and no AF. now with 4xAA and 4xAF i get a steady 31. Now look at my fps for the whole game at the top^ 20-50fps. thats what i got with no AA and no AF! There was no change in fps when enabling 4xAA and 4xAF!
Now i tried the 6xAA and 16x AF and i got about a 15fps drop on the whole game. Even with the AA and AF maxed there was a tiny change in image qualtiy. So it wasnt worth it for me.

now for a very strange thing. i was using the AA and AF settings in the game for those fps. Now when i used the AA and AF in the graphics card settings i used 4xAA 4xAF and it wasnt playable! So this lead me to belives that u can save fps by setting the gfx card setting for AA and AF to application prefernce and use the in game AA and AF. For losing all those fps by using the grx card AA and AF the image quality was the same. unfornatly i only have two pictures of the main menu effects of AA and AF. one is no AA and no AF and the other is my current setting of 4xaa and 4xaf.i used the in game AA and AF.

BTW I had to cut the pictures so that they could fit the 100k filesize limit. also the change isnt that big but through the whole game i loved not seeing any jagged edges

 

[halflife-bmxer]

no one has any aa and af post to add. i was hoping someone would post if they use aa and af. and how it affected their fps.

 

[furiousV]

as soon as i add FF or AF or seomthing, it CS and HL2 totally stutter. sometimes i only get 1 frame for every 30 seconds, took about 10 minutes to even press ESC to change it back. argh. and the sounds just keep repeating, so i just leave them off, to me they are a luxury

P4E 2.8
1024 DDR400
Radeon 9800Pro 128
integrated sound

 

[VirusType2]

no one has any aa and af post to add. i was hoping someone would post if they use aa and af. and how it affected their fps.

Yea I really notice a difference especially on the tree in the top left, I agree, Looks alot better.

Honestly I've never even tried AA and AF becuase

In my experience anti-aliasing requires alot of CPU processing, and is best suited for smoothing out still images.

but I'll try the technique you sugested, to adjust it from the game and leave your graphics card set to aplication preference.

thanks

 

[furiousV]

oh
1024x768
all high, except AA and AF of course
DX9.0 and blablabla i got a headache. argh hate 9 hour shifts on checkouts.

 

[Asus]

I always use 4xAF and 8xAA if I can. Makes it much better.
1024x768 and 1280x960 depending how my framerate is going.

 

[jondy]

Asus, can you use temporal AA with nVidia cards? 8x seems a bit overkill... then, I'd do it, if I could

 

[Asus]

Nope :\

 

[l337x3r1cx]

i use1280x1024 6xAA x 16xAF when i play games... jagged edges piss me off... and my X800 Pro w/ AMD Athlon XP 3200+ let me play with these settings at high FPS and it makes oh such a big difference

my friends comp GeForce FX series card no fancy settings

mine X800 Pro, higher resolution all settins maxed

 

[halflife-bmxer]

as soon as i add FF or AF or seomthing, it CS and HL2 totally stutter. sometimes i only get 1 frame for every 30 seconds, took about 10 minutes to even press ESC to change it back. argh. and the sounds just keep repeating, so i just leave them off, to me they are a luxury

P4E 2.8
1024 DDR400
Radeon 9800Pro 128
integrated sound

thats wierd because your rig is better than mine

 

[furiousV]

erm. . .
windows 2000
page file is on a ATA66 Hard disk, oh need to move it tothe S-ATA
and the 9600XT has higher clock speeds than the 9800pro, its only pixel pipelines or/and memory bandwidth thats less.

and in ur sig, XP 2700+ at 2.18GHz, is that overclocked? i got no clue, the athlons are better for gaming these days now.

 

[halflife-bmxer]

erm. . .
windows 2000
page file is on a ATA66 Hard disk, oh need to move it tothe S-ATA
and the 9600XT has higher clock speeds than the 9800pro, its only pixel pipelines or/and memory bandwidth thats less.

and in ur sig, XP 2700+ at 2.18GHz, is that overclocked? i got no clue, the athlons are better for gaming these days now.

ok that explains and no its not overclocked and as for the higher clocks speeds still i saw in many benchmarks the pro rules over the 9600xt but i gueess the os and harddrive are the problem

 

[furiousV]

oh, i have heapsize at 128mb too.
what do you have yours at?
my memory is now running in dual channel, sine i recently upgraded to 1gig a few weeks ago

 

[VirusType2]

Yea I really notice a difference especially on the tree in the top left, I agree, Looks alot better.

Honestly I've never even tried AA and AF becuase

In my experience anti-aliasing requires alot of CPU processing, and is best suited for smoothing out still images.

but I'll try the technique you sugested, to adjust it from the game and leave your graphics card set to aplication preference.

thanks

Aight, I tried AA and AF

The AF looks alot better, I didn't check framerate but I noticed no difference, tested on Route Canal.
so thats cool, I've had it on Bilinear filter, and 4x and 6x AF looks alot better than that. Like I said I noticed no drop in framerate so thanks for advice

As for the Anti-Aliasing, I didn't notice any improvement, I still have jaggies, I probably have it disabled in my "control panel"

 

[VirusType2]

oh, i have heapsize at 128mb too.
what do you have yours at?
my memory is now running in dual channel, sine i recently upgraded to 1gig a few weeks ago

You have a gig?

I don't know if there is any downside to having a larger heapsize.

If I were you I would have it 512000.

Someone correct me if there is a drawback for having it like this, I have 1 gigabyte also, ive had mine set for 512mb for a while, don't remember why ...
lol

 

[jmjneary]

i think if you have an uber gfx card no aa should be on cause it just blurs the lines to make the pic look more detailed and 1600x 1200

 

[halflife-bmxer]

Aight, I tried AA and AF

The AF looks alot better, I didn't check framerate but I noticed no difference, tested on Route Canal.
so thats cool, I've had it on Bilinear filter, and 4x and 6x AF looks alot better than that. Like I said I noticed no drop in framerate so thanks for advice

As for the Anti-Aliasing, I didn't notice any improvement, I still have jaggies, I probably have it disabled in my "control panel"

your welcome i was having the same problem with the aa this is what i did i turn the aa and af off on the hl2 setting and then exit the game then run the game again and turn them on again try it it worked for me

 

[furiousV]

downsides to larger heapsizes . . . none lol, well it probably just leves less memory for windows to operate. . . and steam
the hl2 engine can not cope with more than 512MB ram
wouldnt exactly 512MB = 524,288KB instead of 512,000KB

 

[VirusType2]

downsides to larger heapsizes . . . none lol, well it probably just leves less memory for windows to operate. . . and steam
the hl2 engine can not cope with more than 512MB ram
wouldnt exactly 512MB = 524,288KB instead of 512,000KB

lol. Too bad you can't play games in DOS anymore. It was like 100 times faster than Windows.
Faster, that is, if you could figure out how to get your program to run in DOS.


I didn't know this .. so you are saying 512MB does not equal 512,000KB.. it equals 524,288KB.

Anyway you are right, the game will crash while loading at anything above (not sure if this is exact number) 524,288KB.

Im a little confused. I assumed it was an exact conversion from KB to MB.

1 to 1000

I still have sound skipping like crazy sometimes... I can't remember how to fix it... I'll try onboard sound right now...

BTW what is the conversion scale?

 

[Laivasse]

Ignoramus question: how do you use the heapsize command?

 

[Laivasse]

Just to add my experiences:

Got an Athlon 64 3400+
radeon 9800 256Mb
1gig of RAM

Ran HL2 first time through with only Anti-Aliasing up to 4x and AF on Bilinear because I forgot to change it....ran pretty smooth, but I sometimes get jumbled graphics when strafing unless I enable V-sync, which makes everything look very smooth but slows me down noticeably.

I recently tried bumping up the AA even further (unnecessary and massively stressful on the comp) and bumping up the AF to 2x, 4x and higher....There doesn't seem tome much of a performance hit between lower AF settings and higher ones, but at the same time there's not much graphical differnce either. I'm still not sure exactly what AF does. So I think I either have it on 2x or 4x now just in case it does do something that I'm noticing subconsciously. I'd like to have v-sync on permanently, but it all adds up togiving me lag....like a fractional delay between hitting buttons and seeing an action.

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

Just for shits and giggles I ran HL2 in 2048x1536 when I got my bigger CRT monitor, and let me tell ya ... at that res you don't need AA anymore!

 

[jondy]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1152380,00.asp

For a definition of AF, complete with examples.

Mutoid_Man, your avatar cracks me up everytime I see it 'STFU NOOB'

 

[Cole]

1 to 1000

Seems like it should be that....but I believe its
1 to 1024

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

Mutoid_Man, your avatar cracks me up everytime I see it 'STFU NOOB'

Thanks, I enjoy my work.

 

[Asus]

BTW what is the conversion scale?

1 to 1024

1MB = 1024KB

It isn't a base ten system (decimal) but rather binary.

 

[furiousV]

1 byte = 8 bits
computers prefer to work with 8s, we humans like 10s
kilo = x10^3
mega = x10^6
giga = x10^9 and thats for anything except bytes

512MB = 524,288KB = 536,870,912Bytes if im right
dont we all just looooove computers

you will find that if you put in 512,000 heapsize and then once your in hl2/css main menu and u go to console, it says "Heap 509.5MB" or something else BUT 512MB, so if u put in 524288, it will then say "Heap 512.0MB"

 

[blahblahblah]

computers prefer to work with 8s, we humans like 10s

As Karl Ravech (from Basebal Tonight) would say "who Knew!"

I would just like to note that not all games support AA. Many modern games are now using post processing effects (ie motion blur) which is done in the back buffer in your video card and prevents AA from being used in game.

Generally I prefer AA over AF. I notice jaggies much more readily than I notice blurry textures in the distance.

 

[furiousV]

1 to 1024

1MB = 1024KB

It isn't a base ten system (decimal) but rather binary.

didnt realise ppl already answered. i came in, started writing before other ppl did then firefox crashed. came back a while later and didnt look.
my posts are rubbish and useless ;(