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Wow, what a difference 4x FSAA makes


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And I will take this opportunity to share some experience I have had with a host of graphics cards with Anti-Aliasing for CM.

I currently possess each of the following graphics cards.

Voodoo 5500

GeForce 3

GeForce 4

Radeon 9700

Anti-Aliasing

This technique improves the beauty of CM in such big ways, its amazing. Some say turning up the resolution is just as good. NO, it is not. You have to see it. I've had resolution rediculously high and you still get the jaggy swim. AA gets rid of it.

Voodoo5500

By far, the best AA I've ever seen. Nothing can compare to it. It was the most lovely CM ever. Folks who debated with me here two years ago just did not understand. You have to see it. Problem with Voodoo5500 was a real slowdown with lots of transparent smoke. It no longer has the speed or memory you want. But boy, it was beautiful!

GeForce3

After 3dfx went out of business, this was my next card from the company nVidia who bought them out. Boy, was it great with other games. Good speed. But for CM, it stank. Why? Because it said it was AA, but it wasn't even done close to the Voodoo5500. The textures didn't swim and looked better with AA, but the model edges were still jaggy and suffered the jaggy swim as the cameral moved. Yuck! I sure missed having 3dfx around.

GeForce4

I wooped with joy with this card. It was real AA! nVidia finally got it right! Maybe they learned from the 3dfx design? I do not know. All I know is that the AA support on this card is what I expect. The jaggies are now taken care of. I had such a hard time convincing people why I knew the 3dfx card was better than the GeForce3 nVidia card, but you know how religion is. Most people thought it was just a loyalty thing with me. NOT SO! I was now very happy with the nVidia, and mostly because of CM! Its still not as good an AA as the Voodoo5500 was (which is still the best looking CM I've ever seen), but it is getting close and AA works as it should.

Radeon 9700

Man, this ATI card screams. It really made my new 2.8 GHz machine scream with even the most demanding games. Very impressive. But for CM, what a shame! It lets you set the AA up to 8xAA!!! But its just like the GeForce3 card, it does a good job with textures, but the polygon edges in CM still have the jaggies and you get that swimming mess. I love this card for what it does for other games, but Combat Mission isn't best with it.

Sooo... the GeForce4 was the best for Combat Mission for me. The Voodoo5500 would be the best, but it comes up short in other areas due to being long in the tooth (smaller memory and slower performance). Speed counts too, and though the GeForce4 is a tad slower than the Radeon 9700, it does AA for Combat Mission much better and that makes a huge obvious difference to the eye.

Can't wait for the next set of cards to come out. I hope the Anti-Aliasing works better for all of them. Trust me, you want AA with Combat Mission. Its a whole better visual feast.

[ February 09, 2003, 08:06 PM: Message edited by: kump ]

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Becket,

I get the same with GeForce4 and AA enabled. If the text is gone, switch to desktop and then return to CM. It should be fine then. An annoyance, but its small. In the 3D portion, everything is fine and the 2D screens are fixable by doing the program switching jig. Give it a shot next time it happens and see if it helps.

As to the cause. My guess its a screen refresh with the 2D text that happens when GeForce is doing something and we lose the refresh for some reason. When you switch from the desktop back into CM, the re-update of the screen gets the text rewrite that then works. Hmmm... Always a text thing with the working AA stuff... I've seen similar issues with other programs, but not all.

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I set my GeForce4 up like suggested-it really is better looking. Particularly things like trees in the distance and fire. I am getting a bit of stutter now, however. Any relief from this? It may be hard to go back visually, but it is a bit annoying to watch those 1/2tracks wheels lurching along.

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That's it, I'm gonna try this. I have a GeForce Ti 4600 and presume I should be able to set FSAA + anisotropic too. But, can anyone give me a clue as to how and where to set it????

I've had a quickl look at display settings and there doesn't seem to be a tab etc for FSAA and anis...

Also is it something that needs to be switchable so I can turun it off if other games don't like it. I run on XP Home too, presume no issues with that? Finally, any idea of which driver works best for my card and FSAA. I'd noticed a few problems people had with this so thought I'd leave it but I do get fed up with seeing tanks wither jagged barrels from certain angles.

If only I could work out how to trun the bloody thing on?? :mad: Video cards, advanced settings and drivers ain't my strong point :confused:

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Hey Shifty

You can use the 30.82 drivers and there is no difference. I play medal of honor online, and there isn't any difference there either. I also play a bunch of other games, offline and online and I haven't seen any difference in the Nividia 30.82 and the 40.82. I'm running a geforce 4 on this machine.

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Last week I upgraded my OS to XP Pro. In the process, I had to ditch my Voodoo5 :( . I LOVED that card. As Kump said, it was the most beautiful rendering of CMBO/CMBB. However, there are other problems with the V5, one being it took a long time to load the 3d graphics, two being you could not switch back and forth to the desktop without garbling the 2d text in the game (crucial if you have a bazillion PBEMs going), and three it tended to white out the screen when the video memory got swamped. But damn was it gorgeous.

Anyway, the V5 is not supported in XP pro, so I broke down and bought a Ti4200 128MB G4 card. I set up 4xs FSAA, but it is nowhere near as good looking as the V5. Maybe I need to crank up the Anisotropic filtering to 8x as someone suggested. But the Ti4200 does load faster, doesn't white out (yet), and I can swap to the desktop with impunity. I wish it had the looks, but the performance makes up some for that somewhat.

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Originally posted by Apache:

That's it, I'm gonna try this. I have a GeForce Ti 4600 and presume I should be able to set FSAA + anisotropic too. But, can anyone give me a clue as to how and where to set it????

I've had a quickl look at display settings and there doesn't seem to be a tab etc for FSAA and anis...

[snip]

If only I could work out how to trun the bloody thing on?? :mad: Video cards, advanced settings and drivers ain't my strong point :confused:

Get a utility called aTuner:

http://www.guru3d.com/atuner/

Allows your to set the FSAA and AF setting for your card directly.

[ February 10, 2003, 01:49 PM: Message edited by: jiggles ]

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Originally posted by Shifty 101:

I wanted to to set my FSAA up but when I do set it to any level then all I get is a black screen at the startup with the backround music. Any ideas?

When you get the black screen, simply hold alt, then press tab, this will minimize the game, then bring the game back up and you'll see the splash screen and be able to play.
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Originally posted by Apache:

That's it, I'm gonna try this. I have a GeForce Ti 4600 and presume I should be able to set FSAA + anisotropic too. But, can anyone give me a clue as to how and where to set it????

I've had a quickl look at display settings and there doesn't seem to be a tab etc for FSAA and anis...

Also is it something that needs to be switchable so I can turun it off if other games don't like it. I run on XP Home too, presume no issues with that? Finally, any idea of which driver works best for my card and FSAA. I'd noticed a few problems people had with this so thought I'd leave it but I do get fed up with seeing tanks wither jagged barrels from certain angles.

If only I could work out how to trun the bloody thing on?? :mad: Video cards, advanced settings and drivers ain't my strong point :confused:

Go to [url=http://www,nvidia.com] and update your drivers.

Be sure to remove your old drivers before installing the new ones, after a couple restarts your new drivers will be installed and ready to go.

Then left click, go to properties, then the settings tab, and then click on adavanced.

Then click on the geforce4ti4600 tab,this will bring up a smaller window on the left, in that, click on 3d antialiasing settings, after that you'll want to change these ot manual, and click 4x for cmbbb, then apply and presto.

When playing other games besides cmbb, turn AA off, it can be a frame rate hog.

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GF - Thanks for the info. Found it now. Just one query. My mistake, my card is a GF Ti 4200 not 4600. But, I suppose it should still work OK. When I get to the AA settings I get several options:

1) Off

2) 2x

3) Quincunx AA (Whatever that is????)

4) 4x

5) 4xS Direct 3D Only

Is it 4 or 5 I choose. I presume if it doesn't work I can just turn it back off? I may use my current drivers (which I think are up to date), presumably, if there is a problem there will be black screens and/or corrupted text? Finally, I presume it's on/off and you can't associate the setting to a particular programme (I haven't darfed hit the key yet).

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Originally posted by Apache:

GF - Thanks for the info. Found it now. Just one query. My mistake, my card is a GF Ti 4200 not 4600. But, I suppose it should still work OK. When I get to the AA settings I get several options:

1) Off

2) 2x

3) Quincunx AA (Whatever that is????)

4) 4x

5) 4xS Direct 3D Only

Is it 4 or 5 I choose. I presume if it doesn't work I can just turn it back off? I may use my current drivers (which I think are up to date), presumably, if there is a problem there will be black screens and/or corrupted text? Finally, I presume it's on/off and you can't associate the setting to a particular programme (I haven't darfed hit the key yet).

I would choose #4.

The Ti 4200, 4400, and 4600 use the same driver, it's just the 4600 is slightly faster, but it makes no noticible difference in CMBB.

When playing most other games i turn my AA off though.

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Originally posted by Shifty 101:

ok I just installed the 30.82 drivers but now I can't find where to up the FSAA. When I had the most current driver (41.something) I just right clicked, went to properties, went to settings, advanced and then there was a tab for my video settings but now there isn't. Can anyone help me?

Something went wrong during the install it sounds like, un- install and start again, this time disable all other programs running before the install, even any Anti Virus programs you have running, when the driver is installed, restart and you should be all set.

[ February 10, 2003, 07:40 PM: Message edited by: Gaylord Focker ]

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