AA with DX10

[eddie777 0]

Hi.

Just a slight issue.

I`m running FSX with Antroscopic enabled and NVidea Inspector at default settings, as discussed in another topic.

All my sliders are at FULL, which I think is astounding.

The only downer, is the aircraft in view has some jagged lines, which I`d like improved, but when I tweak the NI, the aircraft looks better, but frames rates drop when flying through the clouds.

 

The settings in NI are in another language to me.

Can someone suggest a milder form of AA?

 

Cheers

Ian Edwards

 

 

[CVO110 3]

Hi.

Just a slight issue.

I`m running FSX with Antroscopic enabled and NVidea Inspector at default settings, as discussed in another topic.

All my sliders are at FULL, which I think is astounding.

The only downer, is the aircraft in view has some jagged lines, which I`d like improved, but when I tweak the NI, the aircraft looks better, but frames rates drop when flying through the clouds.

 

The settings in NI are in another language to me.

Can someone suggest a milder form of AA?

 

Cheers

Ian Edwards

 

Ian,

In the "How to Doc" on page 3 of 8, first paragraph there is a link to 6 NI examples. Example 4 cleared about 99% of the AA up on my GTX670. Can't complain at all. I didn't try any thing else other than these example. This is on my system so yours may be a little different. Give them a try.

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Try these worked well when I was toying with dx10

 

[Paul J 349]

Rich's settings work very well, Ian, especilly if you have a hot proc, as it allows for very realistic clouds and water. Also, since working with the LH Maddog and the FSDT - FlightBeam KSFO - KLAX - KPHX scenery for the last four weeks I've also found that turning off Aniso filtering (using TriLinear instead) will prevent the screen from breaking up into a zillion enormous jagged, "spikey" artifacts.

[eddie777 0]

Oh wow.

Thanks guys,

Cracked it,

Tried Rich`s NI settings. Aircraft looks much better, and no frame rate hit with clouds!!

Also, as suggested, swtched from Antscopic to Trilinear, and that stopped my flashing clouds.

 

Cant believe I`m running this sim with ALL SLIDERS TO RIGHT!! Amazing

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Eddie glad that worked for you so cooooooooooooooool.

[paula 0]

strange a lot of people say that in dx10 there is no working NI for mode and setting only the grid transp is working.

I noticed from your thread that it is not the case.

I myself also dont see any difference in the setting

whether it is 8xSQ or nothing.

So is it computer dependent?

[tiberiusrr 0]

If eddie777 is using richard's setting, he not only has enabled the normal 4*4 Antialiasing, but also 4*SparseGridSupersampling.

I believe the 4*SparseGridSupersampling (SGSSAA) setting is working and the 4*4 Antialiasing setting has no effect.

Easy to test, if eddie777  disables just that normal 4*4 AA in NI. Bet he will see no difference, because 4*SGSSAA is doing all the job.

 

@eddie777: just for interest, would you be so kind to test that (disable only that 4*4 AA by setting it to "aplication controlled/off") and post if you see a difference.

No fear, you can re-enable it and will get that wonderfull feeling we all have with dx10 B)

Ah, and what is your graphics card?

[Paul J 349]

Here's some deeper AA info for your midnight reading, (pdf here) talking about the different types of AA, with screenshots of, and the differences between GeForce and ATI/AMD.

[Guest]

DX10 is definitely the place to be for FSX.  Paul, Steve, and others have done some great work to resolve many issues with DX10 under FSX.

 

 My settings are similar to Richard's ... I think they work really well for my GTX 680 at 2560 x 1600 (haven't tried the Titan yet).

 

 

Here are some screenshots that I took, tried to use what I know are "difficult" areas such as water shimmers, bridge cables, light poles, dark/light contrasts, airport taxi lines and runway lines ... here is a mix of pictures (just using link as I don't want to upset the admins ... images are 2560 x 1600 so make sure your browser show doesn't try to resize  as that will skew what I'm trying to demonstrate.

 

http://robainscough.com/images/305bbf29e67b6049eed47811a5bc76de.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/249645c5bdf2c7f6f1bbcae12b2a9a19.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/31a644c50e9420483ad2247d8dadff51.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/fb706ec4eef73792c6ba106c51094536.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/eeba8caed74ee437e7dc14c3dbca39bb.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/bb5e3cf8a6dbc5ccb1908296b6720f61.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/218d3a2c5b859ea2f5bc9935d43ff6a3.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/f1a1227932a6aa12b7fcaa31ba3a2d6a.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/a1be216fc6340ebff3af9537c763b13f.jpg

 

 

http://robainscough.com/images/d41c13b4265536691e36e5a066c6e525.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/7d5dc9347280c0cb3cf5b0ccd2e18f5c.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/6375d8a9cb86345b73b0523316cceaa1.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/9ba31741748dc7ad52e7107a87022ad3.jpg

 

http://robainscough.com/images/bf66119cb0136128e0a63d38a8a2a118.jpg

 

This are using REX, FSDT KSFO, BAe-146, 4096 textures, LOD 9.5 and of course in DX10 Preview mode with Steve's DX10 changes.

 

Rob.

[odourboy 1,289]

If eddie777 is using richard's setting, he not only has enabled the normal 4*4 Antialiasing, but also 4*SparseGridSupersampling.

I believe the 4*SparseGridSupersampling (SGSSAA) setting is working and the 4*4 Antialiasing setting has no effect.

Easy to test, if eddie777  disables just that normal 4*4 AA in NI. Bet he will see no difference, because 4*SGSSAA is doing all the job.

 

@eddie777: just for interest, would you be so kind to test that (disable only that 4*4 AA by setting it to "aplication controlled/off") and post if you see a difference.

No fear, you can re-enable it and will get that wonderfull feeling we all have with dx10 B)

Ah, and what is your graphics card?

 

I've been playing in the DX10 sandbox as well and experimenting with NI settings. I've been suspicious of the effectiveness of the AA - setting as well. I'd very much like to hear from eddie777 (or Richard) also regarding if he thinks this setting is working. I'm going to revisit this tmorrow.

 

A different question on the same general topic - I'm running a i5 3550P with a GTX 660 at 1920x1080x32. No NI AA or filter settings seem to impact my frame rates. I seem to be processor bound in any scenario that drives my performance below my 30FPS limit set in FSX. Is this expected?

 

Finally, some use the NI settings NVIDIA Predefined FXAA Usage: 'Allowed' and Toggle FXAA on or off: 'On', others leave it off. I have mine on, but the only thing I notice is the ''3D aircraft selection in the startup screen has reduced aliasing with it on. Any opinions on it's use?

 

Thanks, Brian

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Great shots Rob - just to clear things up I cant take credit for those settings think I found them on avsim also not using dx10 after finding out home base KBOS payware does not work in dx10 so reverted back not happy about it as I thought dx10 was very nice.

[Paul J 349]

Guys: you would remove a lot of the uncertainties by reading (and experimenting as you read) Steve's great analysis of FSX DX9 - DX10 AA here, plus this pdf, here . Phil Taylor also went into "why DX10" in his blog here. All great reading!

 

...and - yeah, Richard - I completely agree - Rob has some excellent screenshots there, with high detail and no AA problems.

 

The only issues I can see, (and maybe it's the way my monitor sees the graphics) are the odd sky/cloud/water color banding in the last two evening/night shots over the water?

 

All the Best,

[odourboy 1,289]

Very similar to tiberiusrr's post in this thread, but more complete, I thought I'd quote it here:

 

 

Sorry for the late response, weekend and family ;-)

 

Let me try to clear things up.

 

There are 2 different settings in NI for AA:

The first one for the "normal"-AA such as 4*S, 8*S, and so on.

The other one for transparency-AA such as SGSSAA.

 

The first one (4*S etc.) doesn't have an effect in dx10 in fsx on my rig (gtx260, gtx660.different driver versions). In dx9 it does.

The second one (transparency-SS like 4*SGSSAA, 8*SGSSAA..) does very well. I need it to eliminate the shimmering trees and some panel lines.

 

The settings in the fsx.cfg as:

MultiSamplesPerPixel=8
MultiSampleQuality=8

also have an effect. I need them in combination with 8*SGSSAA to nearly completely eliminate the shimmering.

 

Enabling AA in the fsx settings menu has an effect.

I need it to enable AA at all.

 

Hope i described it understandable.

 

I spent several hours this morning focusing strictly on NI settings and their impact on my image quality. I simultaneously ran the NI GPU monitor to see how changes impacted GPU workload. This is on a GTX660 and I'll just confirm that DX10, filtering - Anisotropic and AA enabled in FSX. FSX.CFG set to MultiSamplesPerPixel=8, MultiSampleQuality=8.

 

Findings:

Antialiasing - Setting: seems to get completely ignored (tried various low and hi settings) I tried mucking with the Ansiotropic filtering mode setting to see if that could enable it, but nothing I tried made any difference.

Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling: SS settings seem to be ignored. SGSS works. I found 8x SGSS effective and got rid of shimmering. (I removed Negative LOD bias clamp because it did not appear to have any impact with 8xSGSS set)

NVIDIA Predefined FXAA Usage: allowed, with Toggle FXAA on or off: on smoothed things out nicely with the added benefit of removing some aliasing in the 3D plane on the setup screen.

Ansiotropic filtering setting seemed to be completely ignored regardless of the Ansiotropic filtering mode setting. I set it to Off [Point].

 

A few other things of note: Texture Filtering - Quality: High Quality seems to render the same appearance of setting it to Quality, with Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: On. Anything less and IQ is reduced. I opted for teh High Quality setting.

 

I read in another forum that increasing Maximum pre-rendered frames allows the GPU to 'work ahead' at frame rendering to reduce stutters if the CPU is momentarily overloaded. This is at the expense of latency of user mouse and controller input responsiveness. I tried settings from 1 to 8, but I guess my testing scenario wasn't demanding enough because I didn't really notice a difference. I set it to 4.

 

At the suggestion of another gaming forum, unless you're using a 3D screen and glasses, uninstall the NVIDIA 3D VISION DRIVER through the control panel because it's completely unnecessary. Since less is more, I did that, though I can't say it it made any difference what so ever.

 

I would sure like it if someone else tried a few tests to confirm my findings. :-)

 

So without further ado, here are my NI settings:

 

 

[Guest]

 

Richard - excellent screenshots, with high detail and no AA problems. The only issues I can see, and maybe it's the way my monitor sees your graphics - are the odd sky/cloud/water color banding in the last two evening/night shots over the water?

 

I think you mean my pictures Paul?  But yes, banding is from conversion from original 1.5MB PNG to 400-500KB JPG ... not present in the PNG.

 

 

I would sure like it if someone else tried a few tests to confirm my findings.

 

I don't use 1/2 refresh or the pre-render frames ... I have tried them but they didn't improve anything for me, actually made some things slower and visually worse.  I couldn't notice a big difference between 4x SGSS and 8x SGSS other than about a 4 fps reduction.  Agree, I'm not seeing any difference between Texture filter quality at High Quality or Quality, but there doesn't appear to be any penalty for running High Quality.  But I thought this nVidia setting was mostly about the optimization processing of textures with varying degree of complexity which should in theory be mostly GPU dependent and thankfully not CPU dependent.

 

As far as Negative LOD bias, I'm pretty sure this setting should always be "Clamp" when using any anisotropic filtering.  I noticed you have it set to OFF (hence why you don't clamp).  I'm curious why you have anisotropic filtering Off?  I'm also puzzled as to why you aren't seeing any difference with that setting?

 

My FSX.CFG

 

MultiSampleQuality=4

MultiSamplesPerPixel=16

MipBias=10

Anisotropic=1

 

Rob