7950 GX2 max AA 4x?

[jimmyboy2008]

Why can I only set a max of 4x AA in game menu's (half life 2, portal, css, cod4)? Is this a limitation of my card? im sure ive seen benches of this card with 8x AA?

Cheers

 

[Lightnix]

Have you tried forcing antialiasing through the nVidia control panel?

 

[jaykay]

Yer most games only go up to 4xaa. You will have to force it using the nvidia control panel as said above.

 

[jimmyboy2008]

ah I see, i assume when you are forcing AA you set it to off or none in game menus right?

cheers

 

[jaykay]

Best to, doesn't really make a difference if it's set in game as the nvidia control panel will override it.

 

[jimmyboy2008]

nice one

thanks

 

[Rroff]

Don't force it globally... (unless you do want everything to have say 4x FSAA and 16x AF) grab a copy of nHancer (easiest way to do this imo) and change the FSAA for the specific game profile...

I have upto 6x showing in the options in steam games including HL2, CSS, etc. not tried COD4 to see what options are in there.

EDIT: 6x seems to be broken on my 7950GX2 unless I force it in the application profile - auto in the profile and 6x ingame doesn't seem to apply FSAA... personally I only need 4x FSAA tho anyhow - above that the performance impact is quite big and the gains quite small... the next step thats worth it imo is 32x SLI FSAA which looks really really nice but has a huge performance impact unless you have quad SLI heh...

 

[jimmyboy2008]

Yea I just tried editing the profile for hl2 ep1 and it wouldnt let me use 8x AA enless I turn off multi GPU mode which is pointless. ah well 4x aa will have to do. I still cant see how they benched this card with 8x AA when multi gpu mode has to be turned off?

 

[Rroff]

I don't have an option for 8x (or 6x) in the MSAA section of nHancer... probably why 6x doesn't work ingame with auto settings in the profile... for 8x I have to use combined mode 8xS (which doesn't require multi GPU off) tho I can't personally see any difference between 4x MSAA and 8xS combined mode ingame and performance is pretty much unchanged.

EDIT: Just enabled 16x combined mode and that deffinatly has an impact framerate has almost halved from 4x MSAA (average down to 80 from 170). It does look nicer but only on the finer details like cables and thin distant objects that you probably won't notice while playing. I have gamma correct AA and transparency AA on.

 

[Rroff]

BAH steam is still borking my video drivers after running I think its the community overlay - the desktop is extending about 32 pixels off the right hand side of the screen and videos are displayed with a purple hue until I reboot which fixes it...

 

[jimmyboy2008]

Ok im happy to stick with 4x, I just started playing Lost Coast today and this game offers me 6x AA. I heard that the 7950 gx2 doesnt work with HDR and AA on but ive found this to be untrue? 4xAA works with HDR but 6xAA doesnt, is this correct?

 

[Rroff]

In source games FSAA and HDR works fine, in most other games it doesn't, this is due to the method of implementing HDR in source (emulated on shaders) which is different to the more standard implementation (FP16 render target)