confused on AA settings

[flyinion 280]

So, I just made the plunge from DX9 to DX10.  Installed all the tweaks as per the guide.  However I let REX take over rwy lighting with no problems so far at dusk/night.  So far looks like all my mods/planes are working so I'm happy.  However I'm totally confused on the guide for AA.  I have AA checked in the sim, aniso set to tri-linear.

 

I've set NI to my same DX9 settings of 4xS AA and 2xSGSS.  I read in the guide to add the following lines to the fsx.cfg

 

MultiSamplesPerPixel=4 

MultiSampleQuality=8

 

I also changed MultiSamplesPerPixel to 2 since I understand MS should match the SGSS number.  With the lines in the cfg or not I couldn't seem to tell a difference though so maybe I'm doing something wrong?  The non-HD "house colors" of the QW Avro package seem to not be getting as good of transparency AA under DX10 but I could just be remembering it wrong (been a couple weeks since I went to NI vs. built in AA under DX9 now).  Can someone help me understand setting up AA under DX10?  The guides have left me confused.  Also I have AC casts ground shadows turned on, but the shadow is not anti-aliased, is that normal?  I turned that on as per "someone else's tweaking guide" under DX9 where that is listed as a good alternative to the extra shader pass of AC casting shadows on itself.

[flyinion 280]

Ok I think I figured it out after trying variations of the MultiSamplesPerPixel both 2 & 4 and different levels of SGSS I figured out that 2xSGSS for the transparency AA is either minimally noticeable compared to DX9 mode or just plain doesn't work at all.  However I noticed I can run 4xSGSS without any apparent real FPS hit even in OrbX PNW so I'm cool with that and AA is now looking great.  Totally happy to be part of the DX10 club.  Never had better FPS in the OrbX PNW area than I do now.  I used to drop to mid-low 20's looking back at KSEA heading towards downtown in zoomed out spot view with the default A320 around 2500-3000 feet.  Now I'm getting 28-32 when unlocked at the same sliders.  Something I didn't think was possible on my current hardware!!  I easily got a 10-15% fps boost on the low end and maybe up to 10 on the top end.  Even with weather running in the heavy thunderstorm type themes to test out SGSS effect on fps with clouds it was still usable in the mid-20's.

[JoeDoeIII 0]

Glad to hear it about DX10 I am in the same boat as you are now, never going back to DX10, and thanks for the heads up regarding the AA/SGSS settings, that was a source of confusion to me as well.

[flyinion 280]

Just to be clear I'm running the following in FSX.cfg under the Graphics heading

 

MultiSamplesPerPixel=4 

MultiSampleQuality=8

 

Then I'm running 4xS AA with 4xSGSS for the transparency AA.  Setting MSPP to 2 in the cfg and SGSS to 2x in NI as I had done in DX9 mode pretty much showed no AA on the aircraft textures.  Oddly it still killed much of the VC shimmering though. 

[Paul J 349]

The problem we have with AA settings, guys, is that no two pc's are identical, no two monitors are identical, and on top - no two people can agree on "what looks good" in FSX! That makes it impossible to give a set of figures that will be right for every pc. A 4.5 gig pc, with a GTX560Ti will not show the same picture as a 5.0 gig pc and a GTX 580 (or better) gpu. Some folks use a 27" - or even bigger - television as a monitor: some folks use a single 24" at 2560 x 1600: even the brightness/contrast/color setup will make a difference, and on top of that we now have SweetFX with folks experimenting even further. In the beginning the recommended (by Steve, myself and others) was AA and AF set in the sim, with 2, 4, or 8x  SGSS to control shimmering, and 2, 4, or 8x Multi for AA. The addition of those two lines in the fsx.cfg quickly came within a few weeks. This site is where I've kept a record of Inspector settings, with the early settings in the folder's root. I recommend spending couple of hours with one scene, zoom in, and then use the screen capture (the "V" key is default) to take pics, so that you can get some good comparisons. 

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

The problem we have with AA settings, guys, is that no two pc's are identical, no two monitors are identical, and on top - no two people can agree on "what looks good" in FSX!

 

+1  Perfectly stated!  It would be nice if we could have just one set of fsx and display driver settings. 

 

Best regards,

Jim

[Paul J 349]

:lol:   Go for it, Jim!!  

 

:Party:

[flyinion 280]

Yeah I understand that no two systems are alike.  I was just trying to say that in the end there seems to be a difference between DX9 and DX10 mode for FSX as well.  I had to bump SGSS to 4x to get it to even work at all.  I was running 4xS with 2xSGSS in DX9 mode and I'm now running 4xS and 4xSGSS to get the same effect in DX10.