Transparency Antialiasing

[daninthemix]

So I was poking around in my nvidia control panel when I happened upon this setting. Set it to 8x Supersampling, fired up Crysis and discovered that its performance had been murdered (RIP).

My question is, what is this setting, why is it off by default with nvidia drivers and should I care about it?

Thanks!

 

[SkeeterUK]

It smooths the jaggies off of alpha textures i.e gates, trees, things like that.

Basically a texture which has a transparency layer to make a part of the texture visable while rest is invisable. Think of grass in most games where its like a texture of multiple strands of grass that is one model say a square with a texture on which shows just grass strands and hides the rest making it look like individual grass when its not. Kinda thing.

 

[Rroff]

Theres several different levels and types of transparency AA - supersampling is the slowest and 8x SS is very very slow, multisampling should be enough to hide any major jaggies with very little performance hit.

 

[3vil Tom]

It makes things look real smooth, but it does give a massive hit to performance.

 

[daninthemix]

Thanks. In fact can anyone point me to a guide for the NV control panel? Or are we supposed to fumble around and figure it out ourselves?

 

[mountaincow]

http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_6.html

This should be quite useful, I don't know how old it is however the settings descriptions seem to be there.

You could also delve into nvidia inspector which is a more advanced utility allowing you to tweak many other options. I used to have a guide for this bookmarked but I seem to have lost it; it's mainly useful for forcing different types of AA.

 

[Razor Time]

x2 TRSAA on 400/500 cards hardly takes a hit and deals very nicely with alpha textures. I apply a minimum of 2x to my games and go upto 8x on others. Combine this with 32xAA and you will get a lovely looking image, not a jaggie in sight.