Is it possible to force anti-aliasing to work in older PC games?

CurlyWhirly · 15 Jan 2006 at 21:27

I often wonder why despite having a Radeon X800 graphics card with anti-aliasing functions, on some 3D games like for example racing games, even if I have them enabled in my graphics card properties they still don't work in the game itself :confused:

It is as if the game engine is ignoring the settings.
Is there any way to force the game to accept the settings or is this simply not possible?

I realise that setting the anti-aliasing to 6 would slow the game down to a crawl (I think) so if it did work I was only going to set it to 2 just to get rid of the worst of the jaggies.

Any ideas anyone please?

CurlyWhirly · 15 Jan 2006 at 22:32

LabR@t said:
? should work m8

It doesn't though :confused:

One of the games I am referring to is F1 Challenge 99-02

Here is what I have found from one of the Help files:

"Users with FSAA enabled on video cards that support this feature may notice occasional minor graphical issues - we recommend that FSAA is disabled when playing F1 Challenge 99-02. FSAA is enabled and disabled using the video card application provided by the video card manufacturer."

It couldn't be working as I can still see 'jaggies' when running the game or perhaps because I only have the anti-aliasing set to 2, this isn't enough to get rid of the 'jaggies'?

CurlyWhirly · 15 Jan 2006 at 23:42

Richdog said:
Umm... you're complaining about FSAA not working on a game that the developers recommend not to have it enabled on?

Well yes but that was just an example.

I have other games that would benefit from FSAA but I can't get it to work in any case.

Not to worry

CurlyWhirly · 15 Jan 2006 at 23:49

Princey said:
Try setting it to 4. IMO 2 is only worth while at higher resolutions.

Okay I will try it out and thanks.

CurlyWhirly · 16 Jan 2006 at 15:59

HangTime said:
Occasionally there are games where it just doesn't work even when using the driver control panel to override it (e.g. NOLF2)

I have also noticed this but thankfully most games do seem to work by trying out what I say below.

HangTime said:
Incidentally with FSAA at 2x it's highly likely you will notice jaggies anyway, unless using a very high resolution like 2048x1536 or something.

Thanks.
The problem is solved and I can now run most of the 'problem' games in a slightly higher resolution (1152 x 864) and since upgrading to the latest CATALYST™ drivers I now seem to be able to 'force' FSAA to work (in most of them anyway).

I am only now getting back into PC gaming after an absence of over a year and as a result my old CATALYST™ drivers were dated 29/10/2004 (26.2 mb) and were probably out of date :eek:

The drivers I am now using are dated 16/1/2006 and are only 11.6 mb in length!
This is strange that the newest drivers are less than half the length of older drivers meaning that size obviously isn't everything :rolleyes:

Thanks to everyone for their help in this thread.