To Schrullenhaft: Nvidia Panel Settings

[Colonel J Lee]

Hi Schrullenhaft,

You helped me with the Nvidia Control Panel Settings a few years ago (for my GeForce 7600GT card), and it was VERY helpful (antialiasing, supersampling, textures, etc.). I have a new card for my back up computer, a GeForce 8400GS (512) card. Can you give me the optimum settings for this card?

I have jaggies on the CMAK and CMBB vehicles and other units and would like to get rid of them. This card should be good enough to run without them, right?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Schrullenhaft]

Hi Colonel J Lee. To get rid of 'jaggies' in particular you'll need to change some of the 'antialiasing' settings from 'Application Controlled' (the default) to some setting such as 2X, 4X, etc. Generally the higher the setting (sampling, in this case), the better the images/edges can potentially look. The 'Application Controlled' setting is useful for other games that can control this setting, but in CMBB and CMAK this just means that antialiasing is turned off. Higher settings will have a larger effect on the speed of the display (ie. - slowing down the performance with higher sampling settings).

Here's a discussion of the Nvidia Control Panel settings and what their effect is. Some of the anisotropic filtering settings and 'mipmap' settings may help with textures a little in CM. For your reference CMBB and CMAK are DirectX games, so any setting geared towards OpenGL will have no effect on them.

Another factor for jaggies is the resolution that you run the game at. Higher resolutions will somewhat minimize some of the 'jaggies', though they'll still be present.

With the Nvidia Control Panel you can also make 'game profiles' of the 3D settings so that those settings only apply to particular games. You will probably have to create new ones for CMBB and CMAK (they won't be in the list of profiles that have already been created by Nvidia).

Experimentation may be what is required here. Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering will slow down your display. So finding the right balance between performance and appearance will take experimentation. You may find that some features don't have the benefits for their performance costs. The GeForce 8400GS is a little more capable than the 7600GT (DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0 support), but performance-wise it may only be a bit faster, if that. There's a bit of a range in terms of the performance of these cards since manufacturers have clocked the chips and memory at various speeds, all under the moniker of '8400GS'.

If you have specific questions on any of the settings I can answer those. If you can tell me which driver version you are using that can help be more specific on some of the driver features too. The article may predate some features found in your drivers.

[Colonel J Lee]

Thank you for this EXCELLENT answer, Schrullenhaft. I will read the article and play around with the settings. My driver, BTW, is the latest (came out a few days ago) for the card. I cannot remember the numerical sequence, but it's obviously and 8000 series driver.

Also, the card (8400 GS) is a DX 9 card, at least according to the display tab in DXDIAG.

[Gurra]

Hi there, when you are at it,

I just recently upgraded to a 8800 GTS 512 OC card and installed the latest 196.21 WHQL driver, which seems to perform very good generally for me in my games. However, this particular driver comes with AA modes from 2 to 16 and NONE of them seem to work with the CMx1 games, that as in not applying any antialiasing, regardless of which setting I choose. Do you think it might be a driver issue, or perhaps because of lack of support for these relatively new graphics cards?

[Schrullenhaft]

Gurra - There may be bugs in the driver if you're not seeing any antialiasing effects. On occasion certain combinations of settings may result in some features not being implemented correctly. The CMx1 series (CMBO, CMBB & CMAK) do not have built-in support for managing the antialiasing or anisotropic filtering settings of the drivers. So if any setting is set to "Application-controlled", then it will be 'OFF' for CM's purposes. A 'forced' setting in the 'Manage 3D Settings' where a specific antialiasing setting is specified in either the 'Global Settings' or 'Program Settings' should be applied to CM.

Using a 186.18 driver in Windows XP as a reference you may want to turn on these settings for anti-aliasing:

Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On

Antialiasing - Mode: Override any application setting

Antialiasing - Setting: anything other than 'Application-controlled' (which would be OFF)

Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling or Supersampling

The "Antialiasing - Transparency" has two settings that are applicable. Multisampling has a lower performance hit (and potentially less quality). Supersampling has a much higher performance hit, but could have subjectively better quality. I haven't really compared the two to say which is better, though if your video card isn't really too powerful or you're displaying large maps with a lot of units, you may want to stick to Multisampling.

[Gurra]

Thank you Schrullenhaft,

I just double checked my driver settings, and no - they are set to "override any application". So my guess would be that there is some strange bug or so with the latest driver and the CMX1 family of games. Or, some sort of new 'image enhancement implementation' comes out wrong (I think there are these kind of things these days). But it´s not a big deal for me and I would revert back to an older driver, wasn´t it for a very flawless performance in IL2 1946. But it could perhaps be useful for you to be aware of that there might be a compatibility problem with this combination.

For the sake of it, posting my system:

Win XP Pro SP3

MB ASUS P5 GD2-X

Intel P4 Prescott 3.2

BFG Geforce 8800 GTS OC 512

2gb of 533mhz RAM

Updated BIOS and drivers

BTW, good and interesting info on the other driver settings! Gonna use that.

Thank you and best regards,

Gurra