video sharpness question...

[ChrisJake 0]

i've noticed several shots in the screenshot forum where the aircraft look absolutely wonderful. clean and crisp....no jagged lines anywhere. just last week i upgraded to a GeForce Ti4200 128mb card and have been playing around with settings trying to get it right. for the life of me, i still get some jagged edges on my aircraft. i found, and checked the "smooth textures" box...which DID help, but i'm still getting some jaggies.any suggestions on what to tweak next? i've got to believe that with the new card i should be able to eliminate these...thx!chris

[wb5okj 26]

Howdy Chris,Getting rid of the jaggies is what the AA, (anti-aliasing) is for. It does so at the expense of some fps though. Fist try 2x mode. Right click the empty space on the desktop, click PropertiesSettingsAdvancedGeForce4 TI4200Additional Properties|3D Antialiasing Settings click the Manually select the antialiasing mode, then click 2x. 2x is a suggestion to start, now see if this is what you want. Experiment with the other settings notice how it affects your graphics and especially notice the effects on your framerates. You should find a setting that is to your liking. Set your resolution a bit low to start, try a 1024x768 resolution for starters, then go up. Depending on your machine and amoont of memory you have as to how much resolution you can use. Be sure and click the antialising box in the flight sim itself. Keep in mind that you probably won't have antialiasing at a resolution of 1600x1200. The memory hit is too great. Personally I don't like the frame rate hit to run antialiasing on my machine. I run at 1280x960 resolution, and that satisfies me. I do most of my flying inside so a few jaggies don't bother me. We are all different though and some things I might love others would cry over. :D And Vice a Versa.

[Guest jase439]

The need for FSAA diminishes greatly with increased resolution - and the GF4 is MUCH better able to handle increased screen resolution than FSAA. See my post, "Favor Resolution and AF over FSAA" for details on getting that "nice crisp" image on your GF4.J

[ChrisJake 0]

whoa......!!thanks guys! i changed to a much higher resolution and things are lookin pretty good! need to play around with settings a bit more to see if its THE deal...thxchris

[Guest JonP01]

I still find that no matter how high you push the resolution, jaggies are still noticeable unless you enable at least 2 x FSAA. Even when you push the resolution right to the limits of the monitor's capability, you are still limited by how many pixels you can fit into each square inch of a monitor. And of course it is the profound colour change from one pixel to an adjacent one that causes the jagged edges. My personal preference is to run just 2 x FSAA at the highest resolution the monitor is capable of supporting at a 75hz refresh rate. To my eyes, setting much more than 2 x FSAA tends to excessively soften the clarity of the image. Changing the LOD bias only goes so far to counteracting this side effect. Matrox got it right with the edge AA of the Parhelia, but that card is a bit too slow.

[alastairmonk 0]

From what I read, many of the regular screenshot posters deliberately bump up the resolution especially for the shot, then re-size the picture before posting, and don't actually fly with such high resolutions set due to the adverse effect on frame rates.

[Guest]

I run the 9700 with 4xAA & 16xAF at 16x12x32 and the pic is sweet. No jaggies, no shimmering, color and shading is awesome with terrain all the way to the horizon. The sim runs great with no problems and maintains a good framerate. Never was very impressed with nvidia when it comes to Antialiasing abilities. But the nvidia cards do high res antialiasing too so if your card has enough power, turn it on even at 16x12 resolution. Makes a marked difference in quality of pic. Problem occurs when the nvidia just plain runs out of power in certain situations and then the jaggies and swimming and blurry textures appear. Doesn't happen with the ATI card. It's all a matter of balancing the sliders with your video cards abilities to get the best result and having a fast enough processor.

[Guest jase439]

FSAA looks good...my personal take (today ;-), however, is that aniostropic filtering has a more pleasing effect to the eye. At the higher resolutions, I find my eyes much more willing to blend the jaggies away. If you're stuck running at 1280x960 or below, FSAA is probably a better tradeoff than AF.Trying to enable both FSAA and AF (at least on an nVidia adapter) is frame-rate suicide (you can do it...just prepare yourself for a 50-60% plummet). I hear that the 9700, however, handles this configuration much more elegantly.