Can we finally get some FSAA lovin with ATI cards?

i've started more'n one thread on general ati issues before, and they're universally lambasted as all bein ati's drivers blah blah etc...

Well the fsaa black screen issue has *nothing* to do with ati's driver, so lets look at that issue specifically. It would make a huge difference in apparant visual quality for those of us with some of the more powerful ati cards, as given the mostly cpu boundness of SL several levels of fsaa could be implemented just about 'for free' (probably up to 4x, if not 6x)

in any case obviously with current builds, FSAA is unusable within SL for ati users, because the screen turns black.

Thats right i said *TURNS* black... the actual fsaa engine on the card, and through the drivers works *FINE* at issue is the way SL is drawing 2d surfaces. When you enable fsaa and you log in, you see the world around you materialize in beautiful fsaa smoothed clarity, but only for a second, by the time the application loads in the interface ontop of it, you drop to black.

It will stay black unless you start bringing up the radial right click menu (or other 2d gui element changes, but the radial menu is the easiest to trigger, given the whole screen is black)... click and as the menu develops the world will once more become visible (in beautiful fsaa smoothness) but then once the menu has finished drawing in, a split second later, you drop back to black.

Something about the way the 2d GUI is drawn over the 3d SL world is breaking the fsaa... and thats something that LL has direct control over. Its not ATI drivers, or some random unknown issue, its quite specific to the way SL draws these 2d screen elements (other games have behaved similarly until patched by their respective developers over the years, nvidia 2x fsaa and dungeon seige comes to mind for an example)



Now im not angry or upset with the lindens over the lack of attention stuff like this is getting, directly... im just getting increasingly frustrated with them blaming *LONG* standing ati display issues such as this one (which is quite specifically in LL's court) on the drivers as an easy excuse to not even look at the problem, and find out its probably fixable by changing what could very well be only a couple of lines of code in how the GUI is rendered on ati cards (as i said, the actual 3d portion of SL fsaa's and renders fine, in those little split second moments right as the 2d screen elements such as the radial menu are changing)

(anyone else out there with ati cards want to confirm this with me? enable fsaa and run SL... check to see that initial 3d display is fsaa'ed properly, that it dissapears to black when GUI elements become visible, and that when opening/closing the radial menu, its present again but only until the radial menu is finished drawing)

Uhmm, whats FSAA?

Sorry to be stupid here but I dunno what that means.

lol sorry oz.. its full scene anti-ailasing

basically its what makes jagged 'sawtooth' pixels along polygon edges become silky smooth.

It is the real difference between low end consumer 3d graphics and professional stuff you see on tv/movies... enable a high amount of anti-ailasing and the graphics on yer monitor will look as smooth and polished as stuff you see comercially produced on tv shows. (well assumin the actual 3d engine of the game is up to snuff. It REALLY improves some games, such as the new deus ex is fairly ugly without it.. but turn it on and it looks MUCH nicer...

SL is another game that would really drastically benefit from it, you'd immediately notice the difference on people's faces, especially if they were more'n 3-4 m away from you, and in general builds would look alot more 'real'... it gets easier for your brain to believe in a 3d world when its not constantly assaulted by 'dancing ants' sawtooth polygon edges left and right)

Ooooooo, I'll have to try this next time SL is up.

You know if its all black I could *imagine* it looks pretty.

heh... the really agonizing thing is just how pretty SL *DOES* look with 6x fsaa in those brief flashes when its visible... i'll try to capture a screen shot of it tonight, but im not wholly sure thats going to be possible

Uhhh, ok, I'm either stupid, blind, or tired. I can't figure out how to turn FSAA on, heheh. Suggestions?

go to the display control panel... the right most settings tab has an advanced button... alla good stuffs in there... you pick 3d i believe and jus set the openGL slider more towards quality and it'll do it for you (you can custom it too oz, but for now jus go with the nice happy slider)

Yeah, I figured it was in there, wasn't sure which option to mess with though.

I put it to Optimum Quality or whatever, and yes, I got exactly what you described, its all fine, it loads for a SPLIt second, then BLACK OUT. And when you randomly click and get the pie menu it loads again for a SPLIT SECOND then blackout.

I retried FSAA to see if you were right about the mouse thing (I can't find the post where you described the testing you did with this). And yes you were, if I were to keep my mouse out of the SL window everything is fine, it looks great! BUT, as soon as my mouse goes into the window BAM, black out. I was trying to figure out a way to get it to go back to being fine but it wouldn't for me, seems as soon as the mouse touches the window all hope is lost.

SL looks quite nice indeed with FSAA, I did notice things seemed a bit slower, but I was of course in Federal and theres a large gaggle of people there, so I'm more incliened to think it was that rather than FSAA slowing it down.

Poke yourself in the eyes, it will achieve the same blurry effect as FSAA

Bleh, nvidia user

actually technically eggy's wrong.. blurring would mean less detail is present in each pixel.. which is quite the oposite of what happens in FSAA where you actually get *MORE* data in each pixel.

its the difference between scanning and trying to read a book at 150 dpi... and scanning the same book at 300 dpi and then shrinking the image to read it at 150dpi... in that case, as in fsaa each pixel is actually the average of the data from the previous 4 pixels... aka each pixel contains 4x the data as it did previously

Eltee: Can't you just right click (for the radial menu) 60 times/sec?

i once had a friend who OWNED at mario party... his trick? he was able to click a button more'n 5 times per second... its not easy... 60? impossible

I can actualy make my whole body (and certain body parts alone, think hand, leg. ) shake as if having a seizure/vibrating. Comes in VERY handy for those video games.

However clicking the radial menu like that would make it pretty much nigh impossible to do anything else.

Well.... you could write a program that clicks the mouse 60 times a second, but that might just overload the Interupt Controller on the motherboard (happens when you press too malny keys at same time, click too many times, when the processor is busy, etc, evident ALOT in older systems). But still, you'd have to give up use of the mouse, which is probobly difficut for most people (like me for instance, I like to divy up the damage my hands take between the keyboard and mouse; I use shortcuts half the time, and point and click half the time).

Shadowrun. Move-By-Wire lvl 4.