NVidia Anti-Aliasing Guide (updated)

King's Quest (2015) looks like it has been updated for the new episode and as such the existing AA compat flag I was using (0x00000245) no long works as I can see very bad flickering on the bed curtain on the main menu.

Does anyone know of an alternative working flag please? Thanks.

 

Try 2C5 instead. Or 2C1

 

For me SGGSSAA seems to have no affect, remembering the game is a windowed mode game then its no surprise.

But my biggest issue with LR is the crashes. The first 2 FF13 games were very stable, but not LR.

 

Is there any anti aliasing bit for Dark Souls 2 DX11?

 

It seems your display resolution set and native resolution HAVE to match or be lower. At least in my testing.
With the game set to 1080p on my 768p set, AA wouldn't work. Even if I ran the game at desktop set to 1080p.

720p worked IIRC because it was scaled 1:1 and less than native. I don't know. the whole game is ****ed.

Nope. We asked and had a thread stickied on Nvidia's forums for over 2 years to be able to do this to DX11 games. They ignored us. Why do that when you create exclusive ****ty tech like TXAA that can be integrated into games and advertised!

 

FF:LR works for me as well with that compat bits.

There is one gotcha though, the game window must not be scaled in any shape or form when the game is started. So:

Display Res -> 1920x1200, Game Res -> 1920x1080 (OK)
Display Res -> 1680x1050, Game Res -> 1920x1080 (NOPE)

Once the game is running though, you can switch back and forth to fullscreen/windowed without any hassles.

Also, if you are only scaling say 2560x1440 to fullscreen on a 2560x1600 display, or similar with a 1920x1200 and 1920x1080, then 2xSGSSAA should produce quite good quality without making the city stuttering/drops appear much worse.

Here's the NV Inspector Profile.
http://imgur.com/jgdIrQK

Probably also a good idea to force maximum performance mode too, that did reduce the stuttering for me in some instances where it was a result of clocks ramping down for power saving, then not ramping back up quickly enough to prevent frame time overshoot.

 

Yeah, the game and Nvidia's dumb clock speed changing do not agree.

With it set to adaptive, it wasn't even maintaining the minimum base clock lol.

 

The 0x000000C1 flag for Far Cry 1.3 x64 doesn't work for MSAA/TrSSAA on the latest drivers in Win10. It does work for SGSSAA though.

 

Guys, is there a simple way to know which are the differences between every AA Tech and which games need a especific one?

 

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/122/1

In inspector though we have.

• FXAA - A Post Process AA method that treats the game image as a flat 2D plane and goes through a process of detecting local contrasts and edges to determine what to average out and what to apply high frequency attenuation to.
  FXAA on it's own is only good as a last resort. Combined with something like DSR for a Hybrid Sampling approach works pretty well though. The oversampling negates any softening of the image and helps clean up edge quality quite a bit over just OGSSAA.
• MSAA- This is more complicated to explain. So i'll leave this here
  https://mynameismjp.*wordpress*.com/2012/10/24/msaa-overview/(Remove the asterisk before and after wordpress)
  Basically though it's like SSAA but only for Geometry, and samples the pixel shader only at 1x for anything that isn't a triangle that isn't covered by a sub-sample.
  You'll only want to use the 2xMSAA, 4xMSAA and 8xQMSAA modes. Maxwell doesn't support CSAA and they are pretty pointless for modern games.
  
• In the driver "Super Sampling" = OGSSAA- Ordered Grid Super Sampling AA. This takes the entire image and renders it at a higher resolution based on the ratio selected and calculates an automatic LOD bias in the process. The sampling grid is an ordered pattern like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/GridSS.png
  
  This is the same as Downsampling or DSR, but often with many modern games the driver version of this doesn't work as well. And can often be far more costly performance wise for whatever reason. And look worse at the same time depending on the input from the game and the standard box filter resolve that isn't super great.
• HSAA (Hybrid Sampling), ex: 4xS (1x2 OGSSAA+2xMSAA) - HSAA takes OGSSAA and combines it with MSAA. The results depending on the game if it's working with the bits given, can be good to great to terrible. It can also be combined with TrMSAA (If it works with that game) or TrSSAA or SGSSAA.
• TrMSAA - Transparency Multi Sampling. This applies MSAA of the same base rate used to applicable Alpha test surfaces and textures. It looks good when it works. Mostly older games.
  Requires MSAA to be enabled.
• TrSSAA - This plays back the pixel shading N number of times to alpha test surfaces and textures independently of the MSAA mode in use.
• SGSSAA - This uses MSAA as a base and then uses it's color/sub samples to replay the pixel shading of the entire scene N number of times based on the matched MSAA/SGSSAA mode. This handles essentially all kinds of Aliasing, sub pixel aliasing, texture aliasing, geometry aliasing, shader/specular aliasing,transparency aliasing.
  SGSSAA can sometimes also AA secondary effects buffers like Shadow Maps or Depth of Field. (But may depend on the resolution used on some games. It gets fickle because every game is different)
  
  SGSSAA must be matched with MSAA samples.
  2xMSAA+2xSG
  4xMSAA+4xSG
  8xQMSAA+8xSG

But what works well for one game might not work well for another. Ultimately that's up to your own testing and judgement to decide what you like better despite what may be objectively be better.


Experimenting is good, sometimes games work best not just with one AA method but a combination.


Generally if there aren't any issues with it, 4xSGSSAA is a good starting point if you can afford the performance in any game made in the last 8 years that has a lot of texture, shader and sub pixel aliasing.

You can also combine SGSSAA with DSR if you have the performance to get the absolute best results closest to the ground truth at a playable rate.
(Though in some games SGSSAA is more expensive than others. So experimentation is key. Sometimes other less sophisticated methods work just as well)

Grumble. Win 10 seems to mess with a lot of stuff.

 

Small addition to this one: the 0x000000C1 flag does allow for MSAA and TrSSAA to be forced if \r_HDRRendering is set to 0. With HDR enabled the only possible option with this flag on 361.43 / Win10 seems to be SGSSAA.

 

EDIT: ignore this part unless you just want MSAA

- American McGee's Scrapland -

0x000D02C4 - works for MSAA (tested using 8x)

Works well for MSAA.
SGSSAA works well when piloting a vehicle, but breaks when on foot (covering only some objects). SGSSAA has an odd seam / gap in coverage (see screenshot), not too noticeable in normal gameplay.
Tried OGSSAA and hybrid AA with this bit - both modes have pretty poor image quality and performance (OGSSAA looks marginally better than no AA, 32xS looks marginally better than 8xMSAA, runs poorly and doesn't improve texture aliasing as much as you'd expect).
Bloom isn't improved much by AA, so some shimmering occurs regardless of AA method. Might scale with resolution.

Screenshots:
No AA: http://i.imgur.com/4jT7OHq.png
8xMSAA: http://i.imgur.com/M6TuOpR.png
8xSGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/5kvX8fp.png (coverage seam / gap down and to the left of crosshair. Draw a line from bottom-left corner to top-right corner...)
8xSGSSAA (16:9): http://i.imgur.com/ObrcCYD.png

8xMSAA (on foot, working): http://i.imgur.com/eaVkDg2.png
8xSGSSAA (on foot, broken): http://i.imgur.com/eNzloI7.png

- American McGee's Scrapland -

0x000000C0 - works for SGSSAA and OGSSAA (tested using 8x and 4x4)

Trying to force plain MSAA results in no AA.

Screenshots:

All using the widescreen fix found here.

Flying, no AA: http://i.imgur.com/8osGu3Y.png
Flying, 8xSGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/HDYjMFw.png
Flying, 4x4 OGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/f04kLhQ.png
Flying, 32xS + 8xSGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/IRvPJhR.png

On foot, no AA: http://i.imgur.com/6zcYZlz.png
On foot, 8xSGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/88aE3uh.png
On foot, 4x4 OGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/m9NcNtP.png
On foot, 32xS + 8xSGSSAA: http://i.imgur.com/vBIWowz.png

(Afterburner / Rivatuner screenshot of 32xS + 8xSGSSAA just produced a black rectangle, so used FRAPS instead)

-----

HBAO+ 0x00000034: http://i.imgur.com/2Orx5sT.png (8xSGSSAA)
Only works in a few places when flying around or on foot in exterior areas. Seems slightly more reliable in interiors. Breaks at certain angles.

 

But does a game with such simple lighting even need a custom AA profile?
Perhaps just "0x00000000" or "0x000000C0" should be enough?

Sometimes using unnecessary AA bits can also cause problems.

 

Yeah, I found that bit working for MSAA a while back (testing preset bits from other games), remembered it earlier today and didn't re-test others before posting... whoops

No bits = no AA in Scrapland.

0x000000C0 works pretty well for SGSSAA (no coverage seams, functions when on-foot), thanks

 

Thanks friend!

 

I forgot to mention DSR too, as there is a way we can use that to go beyond NvCP
http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=5121671&postcount=3088

 

Remake your post of this with some pictures and i'll add it.

 

Done, updated original post.

 

Thanks. Added.

 

an update

1 - When I tried to launch LR again with 8xsgssaa my system was hard locking, the game didnt even load, it was just preparing to load, also the AA compat flags didnt change the behaviour very odd, I remembered I had updated my drivers last week to the latest 361.43 drivers so downgraded again to 353.38 and bam hardlock is gone, are 361.xx buggy for 8xsgssaa?
2 - Now SGSSAA does make a difference, I can tell not only visually but by the stress on my gpu, before setting 8x the gpu was still really low load and no different to whatever built in AA SE use. Now At 8x the card is at 80% power limit and I get frame drops entering battle, so I dropped to 4x which has no performance loss and power load averages around 50% (it averages 8% with no SGSSAA).

Regarding my crashes I still didnt resolve them, but I am curious now if the game will be stable with working SGSSAA, if it is I will suspect a voltage stability issue at my idle 3d clocks, and mod my bios again to bump the voltages used when at low 3d clocks.

All the crashes remain only in the ruins and seem to be either when a monster spawns or right after they spawn.