nVidia 40.72 WHQL's Fix FSAA in XP SP1

[Guest jase439]

You MUST turn OFF FSAA from within the Display Settings in FS2K2 and enable FSAA from the driver instead.

[Guest PhilC]

I'm using the 40.72 drivers now and, so far, I really like them. Seems to have smoothed out the sim for me and the textures look great. However, my text in FS2K2 is still screwed up. I have AA set at 4xS and force AA in Direct 3D apps checked in RivaTuner. I have AA in FS unchecked.Any ideas?My specs:Dell Dimension PIII, 1 GHz512 Mb RDRAMGainward NVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 128Mb Golden Sample40.72 Video DriversSB Live! soundWindows XP Pro SP1MSFS2002 Pro Full InstallCH USB YokeCH USB Pro Pedals

[Guest jase439]

Have you tried running in a different FSAA mode (I tried 2x and Quincunx and both worked fine)? Also check to see if you have anisotropic filtering enabled - that has always "fuzzed" out the text in FS on my system.I have digital vibrance turned on to MAX. I also have texture sharpening enabled (LOD BIAS) (but neither should affect text clarity).The good news is that the flashing, black-boxy, disappearing menu problem has gone away as has the "3-in-1" tiling of the screen image that you'd get whenever you displayed a popup.j

[Guest jase439]

BUMP

[Guest PhilC]

j,You were right. Disabling anisotropic filtering got rid of the fuzzy text.Thanks,

[Geofa 108]

Try messing with the texture anisotropic stteing-that is what seems to make it work/not work on my end-fsaa is no trouble.http://members.telocity.com/~geof43/Geofdog2.gif

[Guest jase439]

I really like what anisotropy does for texturing, but it still comes at a very steep price with regard to frame rates. nVidia has never done a very good job with this. I heard that the ATI Radeon 9700 does a fantastic job with their anistropic filtering, but have nae witnessed this first-hand.Perhaps someone with this worthy beast could offer some insight here.JPS. Glad you got your text issues sorted out.

[Guest JonP01]

Just to clarify the title of this thread, these drivers are beta WHQL candidates, not actual WHQL drivers.I must say I am quite impressed with them as well. With these drivers on my Geforce 4, I am actually able to enable the neccessary features (AF and AA) in order to achieve what I consider to be satisfactory image quality. However, I am only able to achieve this at a mere 800 x 600 x 32. Anymore higher res than this and things rapidly fall apart at the seams again. BUT, any driver version previous to this could not even manage this, so clearly there have have some optimisations for the Geforce 4 that are not at the expense of image quality.Hopefully my next card (which will have at least double the bandwidth) will be able to achieve all this but at a more decent resolution. I'm still not too impressed with the AA image quality compared to the ancient Voodoo 5500 of two years ago. But the texture sharpening assists a little in this regard. When I play CFS2 on the Geforce 4 with AA enabled, the enemy aircraft look more like black, fuzzy smudges from a distance. With the old Voodoo 5500 they were much better defined. Back in the days of the Voodoo 5500, they had a hidden registry setting known as "sub-pixel optimisation". It was always enabled by default. I remember when you disabled this feature through the registry, the AA image quality worsened and was comparable to that which is achieveable with the current Geforce 4 today. So whatever that sub-pixel optimisation did, and given that certain ex-3dfx engineers are reportedly working for Nvidia, I surely hope it finds it's way into the NV30.

[Guest jase439]

There is something odd about these drivers. I have been doing a series of screen captures with anisotropy forced from level 0 to level 8 (FSAA and texture sharpening disabled - restarting FS in between, of course).Whereas before I could before see a striking difference in image clarity (especially at oblique angles to the horizon) I see absolutely zero change between anisotropic levels. I'm not sure what to make of this just yet. I'm wondering if AF is automatically enabled in the 40 series, regardless of registry setting. It would explain the "slightly fuzzy" text that is always present in FS. In earlier driver incantations, turning AF to 1x off would sharpen the text to perfect clarity. Not so on my system any more. AF 1x looks the same and performs the same as AF 8x. I wonder if this might be a loosy-goosy "hack" to get around XP SP1 incompatibilities? The only noteworthy difference that I can discern is at AF 0x (AF disabled/application configured filtering). At AF0, the text does become sharp again and there is some degredation in texture quality - performance also jumps substantially. I notice also that by default, when you install the 40.72's, AF is automatically enabled by the driver unless you explicitly set the value to ZERO in the control panel. Curious...More later.J

[jd 57]

my fs2002 has never looked better, and has never been this smooth. thanks for your tips. really made a difference!

[Guest]

" Not so on my system any more. AF 1x looks the same and performs the same as AF 8x. "On my system there is a very nice difference between 1x and 8x with little change in framerates. Best seen in train simulator, note the unwanted artifacts moire in the track at 1x which goes away completely in 8x.Actually these pics are with 30.82 but I did have 40.71 for awhile and the effect was exactly the same, forcing 8x in RT took away the shimmering circular patterns on the track. Another subject: The anistroBooster patchscript in rivatuner/patchscripts/Nvidia folder allows anistropic filerting on GeF2 and GeF3 cards. No GeForce4 needed == WHK ==

[Guest jase439]

This is a really good example of what anisotropic filtering should do. I experienced the same with the 30.82's. Unfortunately, they do not work properly with FS2K2 and Windows XP SP1 applied which was my incentive to upgrade to the 40.72's.The problem I'm seeing now is that all anisotropy levels appear to be created equal. According to RivaTuner, AF 1x should be bi/trilinear filtering ONLY. 1x behaves very inconsistently on my system. However, I compared 2x, 4x, and 8x in an animated GIF - absolutely zero change. In the 30.82's I would have seen a marked difference between them as you have shown here. I'm not seeing that in 40.72. I fear something may have changed between 40.71 and .72 in an effort to improve compatibility (.72 was a compatibility release; the .71's and earlier incantations of the 40.xx drivers did not work properly on my XPSP1 system).Alas.What is still of interest to me is that nVidia enables AF by default now.

[Guest jase439]

I think I figured out my AF 1x inconsistency. The texture sharpening bit under FSAA boosts the level of anistropic filtering by a factor of two. This explains an earlier unrelated problem when my card blitzed out on me at AF 8x (the driver must have rolled a register or something, because the net result of having both these options set was that all texture filtering was turned OFF!)If texture sharpening is enabled, you always get AF in one form or another - EVEN IF you've expressly set the AF level to zero.J

[Guest fastdraw]

HelloLast night I upgraded to these drivers with my gf4600 and lost my video in campability. Is this because they are a beta version or have I missed something?Thank you for your responses!Charles

[jd 57]

did you install them via the setup program? did you turn off your antivirus protection? are you running xp sp1?