NVidia Anti-Aliasing Guide (updated)

Anyone know of any good AA bits to use for Beyond Good and Evil?

 

Old game isn't it? Try 0x00000041

No one cares about AA and they only care about getting something kind of decent for as little of ms of rendering time as possible. (And TAA has been all over the map. In general IMO getting more issues added to it for what you get in return.)
Often Downsampling is just lazily thrown in a game as a resolution scale in the options with a poor quality resolve. That's if you are lucky. Though often if a game has TAA that poor resolve will help make downsampling with soft TAA look sharper.
DLSS adoption is laughable and DLSS in general doesn't look great, better than TAA but worse in others. More trade offs for some of the same issues and new ones.
Temporal denoising+TAA in a fully path traced release like Quake 2 RTX looks like hot garbage in the image quality department. And the Temporal denoising actually has a decent performance hit.

I saw something recently with Nvidia showing off adaptive TAA using Ray Tracing. But it piggybacks off of TAA and uses FXAA for off screen areas. Until I see it myself (As using TAA as a basis for anything is asking for trouble), I remain skeptical. Because again, they REALLY don't want any kind of real performance hit with AA. So the quality is always going to suffer unless they make the conscious choice to sacrifice some performance for quality.


Using 16x or 64x SSAA as a reference for these techniques is a good thing.(Even Crysis 2's early Temporal AA used 16xSSAA as a reference point) But often this only succeeds statically if you are lucky on the current content of the frame. All of these AA methods fall apart where it is important, temporally. Over time in motion.

 

Just to add, I've recently applied this fan patch that fixes the Aspect ratio of the game; using NVidia or dgvoodoo normally would cause the game to be squished with black bars on top and bottom of the screen.
Using this fan patch
https://steamcommunity.com/app/15130/discussions/0/864960354268889227/

The game scales properly allowing to play without any black bars showing up.
Thing is this uses a d3d9.dll file that seems to block dgvoodoo and nvidia inspector from working with the game. If I remove this d3d9.dll file from the directory where the game's installed, I can use inspector and dgvoodoo effects, but with the improper aspect ratio.

This is what it looks like in my directory with the patch
https://i.imgur.com/DDdpm5R.png

Take note of the 1 KB D3D9 file
This one I can edit, so maybe there could be a way to get MSAA applied using it at least? This is what is in it atm

Code:

[Display]
bPillarBox16to9=false
bBorderlessWindow=true

This is without the patch
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....153/80E237052C24375DBAEFB1E293237F1858440A7A/

This is with the patch
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....197/D9D1ED86977809C7210EEBDA27511342CD04570A/

 

bPillarBox16to9=false

0x08000041 - for MSAA
0x080000C1 - for SGSSAA, OGSSAA

https://abload.de/img/bgeb3jfn.png

 

That did it! Thank you so much!

 

Added.

 

Does anyone have HSAA bits for Max Payne running under the d3d8to9 wrapper?

 

any way to get some kind of AA working in C&C Renegade? i tried the AA bit which is intended for later SAGE engine games (Renegade runs on the progenitor of SAGE) but no luck.

 

MrBonk: Regarding of Crysis 2, try older version of the game, v1.8 looks fine in dx9 with anisotropic filtering. Crytek messed up the dx9 renderer with their dx11 v1.9 update and never fixed it afterwards. It doesn't even look any better in dx11, at least to me anyway. Some of the additional graphics settings they added to 1.9 GUI can be set in 1.8 game console.

Btw Crysis 3 is currently unplayable on my rig with win10, i9 9700k, RTX 2080 (drv 441.20), 144Hz 2560x1440 freesync2. Regardless of resolution and graphics settings (low/very high) it hovers around 30-60 FPS and stutters like hell. Last time a played it in win7 with GTX 1080 it was fine. Not that I care much, the game was boring, short and didn't make much sense.

 

Has anyone used Nvidias new driver level sharpening with AA bits? I think I discovered a bug related to it in Bayonetta when trying to force AA, for some reason it causes the entire viewport to wobble side to side.

 

I haven't, I primarily use Windows 7 and I haven't updated my drivers or used W10 in a while. It was W10 specific wasnt it?

Well I already played through Crysis 2 in DX11 (Without POM and the DX11 DOF, wish you could get the better Motion Blur without the DX11 DoF but they are tied together. Same in Crysis 3. At high res the DX9 DoF looks better anyway) without much issue. Next time I'll have to remember that and dig out the DVDs to install it instead. DX11 performed a bit better anyway.

Crysis 3 I haven't had any performance issues with other than the fact that it's just extremely demanding on Very High. Running at 3200x1800 with custom settings at 60FPS 90% of the time in Windows 7 on my 2080. All of the AA options in this game are 100% garbage though by default. Nothing cuts through the massive specular aliasing problems. MSAA quality is poor, SMAAT2x has ghosting when looking down any kind of scope. TXAA looks bad due to the poor MSAA implementation and constantly sort of seesaws in and out of handling any temporal issues. SMAA4x has almost zero visible benefit.

I have figured out that if you are willing to play at 30FPS you can get pretty decent AA. Though specular issues are still a big issue.
You can enhance 4xSMAA or TXAA (Or MSAA) with SGSSAA and then Downsample, add FXAA on top and then turn up the in game Sharpening.
https://imgsli.com/OTE5NA
https://imgsli.com/OTIzMQ
https://imgsli.com/OTE5NQ
https://imgsli.com/OTIzMA
https://imgsli.com/OTIzMg

Though if you just want the best you can get at 60FPS. SMAAT2x+FXAA+As high of downsampling you can get with settings you want is the only worthwhile setting. (Though you get ghosting on Grass and with Scopes and sometimes in cutscenes) Don't let the above comparison fool you though. While completely static it is comparable with the TXAA hybrid, it looks worse in motion with more temporal aliasing.

There is also some kind of bug with the default motion blur and DoF. If you disable them, it still causes some kind of broken upsampling effect with fast movement or when using the weapon customize menu. Using the HQ DX11 Motionblur+DoF option (PP=Very High) and turning them off works correctly.

Kind of status quo though as there is some kind of problem getting good AA (and good specular AA)out of all 4 Crysis games. SGSSAA works really well in the DX9 renderer of the first 2 games but CPU performance once AA is enabled completely tanks for whatever reason to the point where I felt it was unplayable. Performance isn't much better in DX10 but better enough to get closer to a stable 60. But Warhead crashed a lot in DX10 for me. (Where as I had the reverse issue about 8 years ago when I played Crysis 1, tons of bugs and crashes in that game. Very few this time.)

 

Does this run on DX8 or DX9? I would try 0x08000041. If it is an old game resolution may play a factor.

Try 0x084000C1

 

DX9. that flag doesn't seem to work unfortunately.

 

Some BGE screenshots, dunno if they'd be a good example of SSGSS AA in the game but figured I should share something ^^;

 

^^ Yeah looks great.

What resolution are you running at? I'm assuming the game only supports old 4:3 resolution or something right?

I totally forgot I owned all the C&C games on Origin. I'll download it and tinker.

 

So C&C Renegade is actually DX8. So you don't need bits.
The problem is that the game has the old "Let's name our executable Game.exe" problem.
You need to add game.exe as an Absolute Application Path to the the existing profile in the Nvidia Drivers.

Forcing AA is no problem after that
https://imgsli.com/OTEzNA

 

hmmm, that's weird. mine is definitely running in DX9 per Afterburner. might need to max out the game's settings in the launcher to get it to use DX9; it has a couple special ones you can only enable through it that have to do with lighting. i added the game's executables like you said but it wasn't working without a flag. i used the flag you recommended earlier and AA now works, but any kind of SSAA is extremely blurry and MSAA doesn't seem to be doing too good of a job.

 

Hmm. I had everything maxed in the launcher AFIK. Are you using any external or 3rd party patches? I'll download and look again.

Here's my settings in the launcher

and here's showing 8xMSAA by itself working fine even on a stretched 16:9 resolution
http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/Game2019120515410497.png

 

i am, but afaik they don't do anything to the renderer, the main patch doesn't mention anything like that on its website. i believe i'm just using an anti-cheat/script extender called TT Patch and a third-party server browser called RenList. i'm preeetty sure that's it, but this install is really old so not 100%. i'm also using ReShade. links below.

http://www.tiberiantechnologies.org/
https://w3dhub.com/forum/files/file/16-renlist-109/

comparison screenshots and inspector profile settings: https://imgur.com/a/PHeo9en

EDIT: it appears SMAA was somehow enabled in ReShade even though it was unticked. MSAA still seems to not work.

EDIT 2: i am an idiot. the dedicated launcher for the modded servers (that you don't actually need to play on them) has an MSAA option in it that actually works. SSAA appears to be non-functional, though. it does something but it's not anti-alias, it just blurs the whole screen horribly.

 

OK well there's your problem. Reshade.
Reshade is wrapping the game to DX9, you need to use the Depth bit to force AA properly.
0x00400041(or C1) will probably work.