No AA in VC

[Staffan 12]

Hi,

 

So, I have now tried with most combination in Nvidiainspector aswell as in DX10SceneryFixer.

The scenery is somewhat improved, but the VC panel has almost no AA.

Nomatter how I tweak DX10, there is no way to get smooth instruments in the cockpit.

I use FSX

What am I doing wrong?

 

My system:

Intel Core i7 7700K 4.5GHz Turbo - Kaby Lake

Gigabyte Z270P-D3 - Kaby Lake

Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 3000MHz DDR4

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB - OC

Deepcool Maelstrom 120T - Liquid cooler

Windows 10 64bit

 

[SteveFx 258]

Can you PM me your name or the order id.

Can you also provide some more detail - what in the VC doesn't look right (I am avoiding the term AA - as most things that you see in the VC are textures and so will not be subject to MSAA)  Is it a dial, a MFD - the edge of the window frame?  Which aircraft are we talking about?  Does the problem occur with the default C172?

Do you have multiple monitors?

 

 

[SteveFx 258]

Sorry,  I just realised that you said it was the instruments!   Instruments such as a dial are a texture (MFDs are a special case though). 

The fixer AA setting is  defining the  MSAA setting ( 4x 8x etc).   This setting controls the traditional antialiasing  which provides edge dithering of 3D objects - if you turn it off you will see that e,g the window frame against the sky becomes jagged.  if you turn it back on, take a screen shot and zoom in using e.g. paint you can see how the edge of the window frame is blended with the sky by MSAA.

The numbers on a dial by contrast are not drawn individually by FSX - the whole dial is a circular object with a single texture. The  edge antialiasing  does not applied to the numbers within the texture - it only operates at the edge of the objects that are drawn. Neither FSX or the GPU is really aware of the numbers within the texture other than as a collection of colours.

Now let consider that the texture is say 128 x 128  and as you view the dial on the screen it occupies only say 30x30 pixels  then somehow the GPU needs to come up with 900 pixels using the 16,384 it starts with.    That is a very hard problem  to solve in real time in the time it take to draw a frame for every texture....   The solution that games use is for textures  to have mipmaps.   The texture starts as 128x128 and then  high quality 64x64 and 32x32 and 16x16 downsized versions are created - this can be done to a high quality as there is then plenty of time available when the mipmaps are created.

At run time the GPU will  take the two nearest mipmaps and blend between them using the filtering defined in FSX settings. 

So the first thing to check is that you have selected trilinear or anisotropic filtering in the FSX graphics settings.

Also although unlikely to impact dials you should check that TEXTURE MAX LOAD in fsx,cfg is set to the largest texture size shipped with aircraft that you own - it will reset to 1024 if you ever make any changes in fsx settings .  The controller diagnostics should highlight this for you and there is a fsx.cfg editor from the op menu which makes it easy to change it back.

 I said that MFDs are a special case.   That's because they are generated by the aircraft libraries per frame and because of this they will be a single size with no mipmaps.  Therefore unfortunately they will not look that good when viewed at a screen size in pixels that differs from the size the developer has built the MFD texture at.

Now there is one last trick that GPUs have that can help us.   They support the concept of rendering everything to a screen a multiple of 2 x the height and width and then downsampling to the actual screen size - this is called supersampling - and is also a form of antialiasing - although its very different to the edge antialiasing.  This can improve the look of instruments and MFDs.   It is very expensive but since in FSX the GPU is otherwise largely idle this is what we want to do.

The only form of supersampling that DX10 supports is Sparse Grid Super Sampling  which you set in the Transparency Supersampling field in NVI.  (As per page 43/44 of the fixer manual)

So to sum up  with a 1080 GPU

1) make sure that you have trilinear/anisotropic filtering set in fsx settings

2) make sure that TEXTURE MAX LOAD is set correctly - usually 2048

3) set 8x AA in the DX10 controller

4) In NVI set   Transparency SuperSampling  to "8x  Sparse Grid Supersampling"  - this is for the profile "Microsoft Flight Simulator 10"

5)  If any of your aircraft aren't mipmapped then consider mipmapping them e.g using the ACES image tool (advanced)

If you have multiple monitors then you need to turn on AA for each monitor by hand in the fsx.cfg

The only difference in DX9 is that you have access to some other super sampling options that are not as good as SGSS  and that you have some combined modes available.   Some of these do an odd size supersampling e.g 2 x which applies a blur to the screen which some people like.   This can be replicated in DX10 with DSR although (unlike DX9) it will downsize screen text such as "pause" etc. 

 

[Staffan 12]

Hi Steve,

 

Thanks for your thorough information. I must have mixed up things.