Please help. Everytime I install drivers, I can get bioshock FSAA working with DX10, but only for a couple games. Then suddenly FSAA doesn't work anymore until I install the next driver. This happens with all the recent Nvidia drivers of the past few months. I control all my FSAA through nhancer and usually setting antialiasing compatibility to AA + HDR works for those tricky HDR games. I have no problem with AA for any other game. For the life of me, I can't figure out why Bioshock AA stops working until I install the "next" Nvidia driver. I have a geforce 8800 GTS with Vista x86. The DX9 AA always works, but I have vista so I want DX10 dammit.
If your playing bioshock in dx10, you dont need nhancer, just use the nvidia control panel, but if you prefer nhancer, you dont need to use the compatibility fix, assuming you have a geforce 8 series or higher
Only difference is the water in DX10 really looks real and it's nice to have IMO. But the rest of the objects shedar quality looks pretty much the same as in DX9.
There are improvements in water, shadows, HDR, and soft particles (ie smoke), but still minor overall. http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM4Nyw2LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA== However, antialiasing is very fast in DX9, but slow and buggy in DX10 if you can even get it to work, which most people can't.
While I don't keep an eye on the exact number of frames I'm running per second, my machine (specs at left) handles Bioshock in DX10 maxed out at 1440x900 without interfering with my game play experience in the slightest. Of course, my card handles AA well, and I wouldn't touch Vista until SP1 came along...
so wait, 4xAA or 8xAA can now be forced in NVCP in DX10 Bioshock? i remember back in the day 2xAA was the most you could get.
Yeah that water does look good. My friend can play Bioshock at highest DX9 settings on his old P4 3.0GHz with 1GB of 800MHz RAM running at 533MHz (yes, it's one of those 533 FSB P4's). He still has a 6800GT I gave him a few years back (I think I may have overclocked it a little too). It's not a bad engine, scales very well. Mass Effect will probably run on his system too. I am going to build him a new PC at some though, maybe next March.
Ok, I think I solved the riddle. It seems that Bioshock in the recent drivers has some kind of hidden setting or tweak in the application profile to enable FSAA under DX10. So after driver installation the bioshock profile is set to properly enable FSAA. Once you change anything in the bioshock profile, like AF or AA samples, you rewrite the application profile for bioshock which makes you lose the hidden setting. Then no matter what you do, no matter what AA compatibility mode you set, you can not fix the AA, until you reinstall the driver. It looks like the problem is only nhancer specific, because once nhancer rewrites the profile, it loses some hidden bioshock setting. Hope this helps. I've also found that D3D Overrider (forces triplebuffering in D3D) http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=208499 really boosts my framerate in Bioshock DX10 and Devil May Cry 4 DX10.
Im finding on my card that i no longer need nhancer to force AA in games like pro evo and bioshock as i can do it through nvcp. It only works this way with the 177.92 drivers anybody else notice this in unreal games also.
Yeah, that's because the new drivers have application profiles pre-set for games with HDR which auto select the proper Anti-Aliasing Compatibility settings for each game.
You could try using nhancer's 'restore original driver profiles' option, it worked for me in similar situations in the past.
I had tried that to no avail. Once I touch any setting in the bioshock profile, AA is broken and resetting the profile through nhancer or NV control panel does not restore.
At one point I thought I had Bioshock working in DX10 with AA (with all the enhancements), but now I'm not sure I ever did. I've been forcing AA through the driver CP. RivaTuner verifies that the game is still running in DX10, but it seems the only DX10 feature the game kept using was the clearer shadows. I did a quick save in an early part of the game while facing down at the water. Whacking the surface with the wrench would only produce the dynamic ripples when AA was disabled in the CP. I was able to toggle the setting several times and reproduce this over and over. The shadows were the same regardless, however. So I really don't know what's going on. Either way, the performance penalty of 4x AA in Bioshock DX10 is so much steeper on my rig than DX9 (sometimes over 50%) that it hardly seems worth it.
Whenever I force AA in the control panel (via the Bioshock profile) it just forces the game to run in DX9 mode.
Tarkan good observation. For me too, with Bioshock DX10 + AA, dynamic ripples are disabled. But it is definitely DX10 mode with AA according to FRAPS, and the graphics menu where I can enable DX10 detailed surfaces. And of course the other great DX10 feature, lower framerate. Part of the problem is that even if your force 2X FSAA in DX10, you get 4X FSAA, thus the big hit. 2X FSAA works only in DX9, for good balance between quality and speed. Whether DX10 is good or not we will never know, because most programmers do not code for it, and those who do only add it as an afterthought. If we ever got games specificially written for DX10, then we might see real improvements. But right now DX10 is a huge dissapointment.
