Antialiasing!

PLEASE give us a checkbox that allows us to turn on/off Antialiasing!!! After going from the graphically rich half-life *chuckle* and seeings its flawless textures thanks to antialiasing, then going to the jaggy SL, its horrid! Currently if you try and play SL with AA on the game has some serious Newview issues (dissapearing objects/screen, the only thing that you can see if the sky for about 20 seconds, then your crash )

Who is with me?!

Antialiasing would be nice

I've got no problems with antialiasing, other than a significant drop in framerate.

I recommend a nice layer of Vaseline (petroleum Jelly) over your Monitor screen.

isn't Anti-aliasing just a slight blur ?

is there a tongue in cheek smilie

tried it but it's hard to read the text then

You know, i just turned on anti-aliasing for the first time in my 8-year computing history.

What's the big deal? All it does is slow down your framerate and make you think you need thicker glasses

Lf

okay few things..

first off if your card is capable of using FSAA... your display control panel will let you enable it. SL doesn't need a game slider for that... in fact there are even various quick tools people make such as system tray icons that can let you enable/disable fsaa on the fly fairly painlessly.


in general there is a sort of display compromise between speed and quality when talking about fsaa... unless your card is more than 2 years old and yer processor newer than 6 months that is essentially a *MOOT* point in SL however as the game is almost universally cpu/memory transfer bound.

in such a position where the graphics card is actually sitting idle waiting for the next wave of texture/vertex updates from the system.... enabling fsaa won't cause really any frame rate penalty and significantly increases visual quality.

(for instance with my athlon 2600+ and 9800 pro i get 30 frames a second lookiin south from my home into rizal with fsaa off... with 4x fsaa... i get 30 frames a second too... 6x does slow it down slightly but still not to a huge degree.



as to why the quality is superior its FAR from 'blurring'

blur happens when there is *less* data presented for each point... such as an out of focus digital camera picture... each pixel on that picture actually has LESS data than an equivalent pixel on an in focus picture since it smears part of the area around it that shouldn't be there.


fsaa is a different beast entirely. with fsaa you're actually getting *MORE* data per pixel than would have been there ordinarily... essentially yer taking a pixel along the edge of something from 1 bit on or off and making it 2 bit, 4 bit, or up to 8 bits 'deeper' in that it can now account for fractions of one object ontop of another. Essentially instead of saying 'this triangle is only 30% on this pixel so it shold be 0.. yer saying since its 30%, lets take 25% of the color from THIS triangle.. and then 75% of the color from the background...

essentially making lines *finer* and more accurate.. not blurrier and less accurate.


early fsaa implementations suffered from excessive memory use and generally weren't worth it.. but these days 2x fsaa is nearly always 'free'.. and *definatley* always worth enabling for the much greater detail that the same number of pixels on your screen can convey.

in fact its so much better at what it does now with multi-sampling its often *faster* and better looking to run a slightly lower resolution or smaller window, and crank up the fsaa... since it only needs to calculate the edges of things not the middles... its like getting 1600x1200 quality at 800x600, with 1024x768 speed

I turn AA on and off in my display properties (Nvidia card) and bypass applications' preferences. For me, antialiasing smooths jagged edges and leaves everything else alone which is very nice. It generally costs about 5fps. I use 2x AA because at the resolution I run (1280x1024) higher settings aren't noticeably better.

Yesterday I was bored so I turned on AA through my control panel. Before, at least with ATI cards, turning on AA caused SL to appear as only a blank screen. But, I tried it and it finally worked! I had it on at 4x and definitely noticed the lack of jaggies. What I did not notice was a slowdown in framerate. I'm not a computer expert or anything, but the conclusion I made was pretty much was Eltee said. Since SL is CPU-based, and IQ enhancements such as AA are video card-based, you shouldn't notice much of a slowdown - if any - if you have a semi-recent video card and CPU. I use a 9600xt and have a P4 2.4ghz machine, and with all the graphics options turned on (except ripple water, but only cuz I hate it) and view distance at 128, I get an average of about 25fps at 1024x768, with a ceiling of about 100 if I'm looking out into the ocean, and a floor of about 4-5 if I'm looking into a sea of avs.

If you have the latest drivers, turning on AA should be just fine. Least for ATI users.

FSAA sucks. I can just punch myself in the eye if I want to see everything blurry.

obviously *someone* didn't bother to read the posts ^.^