Widescreen Gaming Forum

In my continued debate over going ATI in a couple weeks...

I force AA through nHancer all the time. Sometimes the only way to get AA is through an nHancer profile like I just did with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and the Vanguard profile. I am one of those annoying PC gamers who NEEDS AA or I am driven nuts by jaggies.

I have read that getting AA forced when the normal ATI Control Panel does not force it is impossible. Is this true?

For example can you obtain AA in the following games on ATI?

Star Wars The Force Unleashed
Borderlands
GTA4
Mass Effect
Bioshock
etc.

From what I understand there's is no legitimate way to enable AA even on Nvidia cards unless you use a special mod someone made out there. It technically it runs the game at a higher resolution then down samples them to remove some of the edges.
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,696084/GTA-4-test-Supersampling-Anti-aliasing-with-ENB-Series-Mod-plus-graphics-cards-benchmarks/Practice/
some mod called ENB series mod.
About the other games I am not sure, I do know on batman aa and af can work nicely with Nvidia graphics, on ATI not so well, they been having some aa/af issues with some games. I am just waiting to see what NV has to offer for the next line, my trusty 8800gtx is aging well.

About the other games I am not sure, I do know on batman aa and af can work nicely with Nvidia graphics, on ATI not so well, they been having some aa/af issues with some games. I am just waiting to see what NV has to offer for the next line, my trusty 8800gtx is aging well.

Batmans ingame AA works on ATI cards. Its just that Nvidia worked hard to make Batman a postergame for PhysX, so they did a lot of strange things with this game.

1. AA contains a vendor-id block, so if you fake your vendor-id to Nvidia, you'll get ingame AA. On the ATI cards in Xbox 360 it works without faking vendor-id.

2. Other abnormalities is that if you use software physx (CPU), processor usage goes down instead of up.

3. Another thing, is that with GPU accelerated physx, you get smoke/steam coming out of pipes with physics controlling the behavior, while without it, they removed the smoke/steam. PhysX doesn't add smoke, it only controls the behavior of smoke. But, the effect would be less visible if you'd have smoke without GPU accelerated PhysX (like volumetric smoke), so thats probably why they removed it (like with Mirrors Edge, where you have PhysX banners vs. no banners).

Batman is a posterboy for negative vendor intervention. It shows how vendors can crap on gamers in order to sell GFX cards. After all, people think its ATI drivers preventing ingame AA in Batman, while its a vendor-id block thats preventing it.

If ATI were to do the same with Dirt 2 (tessellated audience vs. no audience or tessellated flags vs. no flags and a vendor-id block for DX11), DX11 effects would be more visible like physx and people would complain about lack of DX11 on Nvidia cards (when Nvidia gets DX11 cards that is). I'm glad they descided not to go the "crap on gamers" route.

Nvidia makes good hardware. They should focus on making the hardware stand on its own, instead of limiting games on competitor hardware in order to sell their stuff. People pay full price of games to play them, not to get caught up in some vendor war.