Since my purchase of FSX seemingly eons ago, I was surprised by one thing. No matter the setting, anti aliasing just did not seem to work for me, at least when it came to aircraft. It works gloriously in FS9, not in FSX. Until this week. I purchased the RealAir Turbine Duke and was surprised to see how great anti aliasing worked on that aircraft. I read the docs closely and discovered why--the Duke's textures are mipped. I recall a long time ago reading a similar issue in FS9, where only mipped textures anti aliased correctly. So I took a recent purchase, Carenado's B200, and picked a livery with jagged edges when seen from spot view. Using DXTBMP I mipped those textures, and the B200 anti aliased perfectly.

 

Does anyone have a guess why anti-aliasing is only working with mipped textures, with FSX? It would be a chore to go back and add mips to all of my favorite aircraft. My video card is a bottom line, 9500 GT.

 

Regards,

 

John

That is interesting. I'm just learning this aspect of simming (painting, textures) so I went to DXTBMP to learn what they say about MIPs. They define what they are, a chain of 1/2 resolutions down to 1x1, but for people like myself who haven't performed MIP-ping(?) it remains a mystery. Do you know of a procedure or is it so simple there isn't a need for one?

 

DXT didn't provide a clue about using it for this work. In fact, if I hadn't read your post saying you performed MIP builds using it, I wouldn't know that it's capable of doing this.

 

Thanks for sharing the observation. I haven't seen evidence of AA problems on my Carenado aircraft - the TDuke and the B200 both appear to be fine as far as I can see. "See" being the operative term, of course...

 

Thanks,

 

Mark

Normal AA only applies to polygon edges anyway, not to what's on textures. The only way you'll see AA smoothing on textures is by using a full scene method. (ie a supersampling mode). I have the unmipped Dukes and they AA just fine... a lot of our NGX is unmipped as well and it looks fine as well.

No matter the setting, anti aliasing just did not seem to work for me,

 

Are you using Nvidia Inspector or Enhancer for AA? if your only using the default AA, you will have bad AA on all aircraft.

But to a lot of people non-mipped does not look very nice except close up. Like many, I was forced to learn the Arcane art solely to fix some AI planes that looked horrible to me. (and once done, I promptly forgot all I had learned)

 

If I heard nowadays that a product was not using mips, I would probably immediatly lose all interest.

 

I don't think it actually affects antialiasing though, it's just that unmipped planes can look unaliased at variable view distances.

Are you using Nvidia Inspector or Enhancer for AA? if your only using the default AA, you will have bad AA on all aircraft.

 

My Nvidia control panel has all the same options as Nvidia Inspector and Enhancer. I cycled through all the options, but so far, the only visible anti aliasing appears on mipped textures. Now FS2004 anti aliases all aircraft, unless by odd coincidence all my FS2004 add on aircraft are mipped.

 

There's about a half dozen aircraft that occupy almost all my flying time. I'll mip those, keeping backups of all the original textures.

 

John

 

My Nvidia control panel has all the same options as Nvidia Inspector and Enhancer

Not nearly as many it also will not inject AA at near the levels inspector will!

Not nearly as many it also will not inject AA at near the levels inspector will!

 

I'll give inspector a try--I can always uninstall it if it doesn't do anything.

 

John

 

Edit: I gave it a try, trying out a good dozen or so AA modes. In FSX, on unmipped textures, they make no difference just like the Nvidia Control Panel defaults.