jabberwock95
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Sorry to cut and paste from PlanetHalfLife with the way everyone feels about it at the moment, but I thought this might be news to people.
"Wrom: AFXISHJEXXIM
Subject: HL2-DX9 anti-aliasing
I've noticed that on your site you haven't (at the time I'm writing this) said anything about the anti-aliasing problems that HL2 may have. Here's an excerpt from my local gaming mag, PC Powerplay:
"It seems that Valve didn't take into consideration that DirectX9 doesn't expose a feature known as Centroid Sampling. The problem occurs when anti-aliasing is enabled at the same time as packed textures are used (smaller textures are packed into larger textures, a technique that is used in Half-Life 2's textures to increase performance yet retain high detail). If you try to enable anti-aliasing on packed textures, the polygon boundaries become distorted with artifacts. This explains why all the footage of HL2 that has been released has not had anti-aliasing enabled. In a nutshell, you won't be able to play HL2 with anti-aliasing enabled on today's hardware with DirectX9."
It goes on to say that Centroid Sampling will be released with DX9.1 and all RADEON 9XXX cards have Centroid Sampling enabled so all you will need will be DX9.1 enabled drivers. There is even rumour of an ATI workaround before DX9.1 ships. For NVIDIA users however, who do not yet have Centroid Sampling, Mr Newell's workaround is to "trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect." Quite simple really. It seems we are all going to have to get used to the lack of AA until DX9.1 is released or a workaround is implemented, however."
There you go. Sorry if this is old news or incorrect feel free to close this thread or to tell me (politely please, no flaming). Please no messages badmouthing PlanetHalfLife here. This isn't what this thread is about. So, anyone else heard about this, or is it a big hoax?
"Wrom: AFXISHJEXXIM
Subject: HL2-DX9 anti-aliasing
I've noticed that on your site you haven't (at the time I'm writing this) said anything about the anti-aliasing problems that HL2 may have. Here's an excerpt from my local gaming mag, PC Powerplay:
"It seems that Valve didn't take into consideration that DirectX9 doesn't expose a feature known as Centroid Sampling. The problem occurs when anti-aliasing is enabled at the same time as packed textures are used (smaller textures are packed into larger textures, a technique that is used in Half-Life 2's textures to increase performance yet retain high detail). If you try to enable anti-aliasing on packed textures, the polygon boundaries become distorted with artifacts. This explains why all the footage of HL2 that has been released has not had anti-aliasing enabled. In a nutshell, you won't be able to play HL2 with anti-aliasing enabled on today's hardware with DirectX9."
It goes on to say that Centroid Sampling will be released with DX9.1 and all RADEON 9XXX cards have Centroid Sampling enabled so all you will need will be DX9.1 enabled drivers. There is even rumour of an ATI workaround before DX9.1 ships. For NVIDIA users however, who do not yet have Centroid Sampling, Mr Newell's workaround is to "trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect." Quite simple really. It seems we are all going to have to get used to the lack of AA until DX9.1 is released or a workaround is implemented, however."
There you go. Sorry if this is old news or incorrect feel free to close this thread or to tell me (politely please, no flaming). Please no messages badmouthing PlanetHalfLife here. This isn't what this thread is about. So, anyone else heard about this, or is it a big hoax?
