Graphics Beginners\' Guide, Part 1: Graphics Cards

[yyrkoon]

Well, I suppsoe its a good read for someone who doesnt already know about the technology, but since I already do, I just find myself reading the bolded topics, and moving on. I did find the difference between 16x AF and none, pretty funny, pretty much what I already had concluded on my own, it basicly gives no improvement, and in return eats CPU/GPU cycles

 

[weilin]

haha, i was wondering the same thing, if they hadn't labeled it, i would have never known it was 2 different pictures. As for AA, it just makes prettier clouds.. but when being shot at, who on earth is looking up at the clouds...

 

[nottheking]

This post actually comes before I've finished reading the second part of the article. Apparently, this thread should perhaps be re-named, if this is the thread to discuss all three parts on, rather than just the first.

Thanks for answering that, nottheking.

Just to answer sopme of your questions... some things weren't delved into with maximum detail, that was a conscious effort not to saturate the reader for whom this is a primer.

The idea was to have something to initiate a layman to the point where they would feel confortable reading an average graphics card review, maybe even reading video card specs and drawing a few hypotheses/expectations of performance on their own.

having said that, sometimes more info can be better so if you guys have alot of feedback on a particular subject I suppose the primer might be modified in the future to accomodate that.

But I urge you to wait until all the parts are released until you make your judgements. Like I said, lots and lots more info on the way. Can't give you a date though, that's up to Patrick.

Of course, I am well aware that a lot more is to come. (though I write this after reading Part II)

My main comments, aside from the bit on VESA, (which I mentioned since the article already covered effectively superflous interfaces) were based upon the idea that they might be rather valuable information to the neophyte, especially on telling what each sort of slot looks like on a motherboard. In the months before the release of Oblivion, I'd guess I answered a bit over 10,000 graphics-card related questions, and in a lot of cases, things hinged on what kind of graphics card slot the gamer in question had.

Of course, I, too, recognize the necessitate not to "over-saturate" the thing with information. I've found that such can be a turn-away, and defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Deep graphics knowledge is gained incrementally, as I've told many people outside of this site.

I am quite surprised no one caught this:

<snip>

I actually did catch it, but even more embarrasing for me, (I've long known that Composite is one signal, S-Video is two, and it's Component that's 3) I had managed to forget it by the time I was actually writing my post. That happens a lot. 😳

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

I actually did catch it, but even more embarrasing for me, (I've long known that Composite is one signal, S-Video is two, and it's Component that's 3) I had managed to forget it by the time I was actually writing my post. That happens a lot. 😳

I admit to skimming and not really noticing. I don't expect a description of the timing either, but I that's why it's here, not for us but for peope just learning about this. I didn't even notice, I noticed other bits.

Well and the thing is the granularity you want to get to, like you mentioned describing the connectors is a great Idea, giving a little information also a good idea, but getting down to the pin-out level not necessary so I think Cleeve's going about finding the balance of too little and too much info.

 

[nottheking]

Okay, as for the second part of the article...

Does nVidia actually state somewhere that the texture fill-rate has to do with "pixel pipelines" and actually differentiates these from TMUs? I think it may simply be the case that nVidia, since they have shown to be TMU-centric in their designs, they may consider TMUs to BE the pixel pipelines, and perhaps it might just be best to trim that section to reduce possible confusion.

Also, "features" comes conveniently right after fill-rate; it might've been prudent to mention that, indeed, this was another sort of fill-rate at work, to help put all four types of unit on a level, since you already mentioned fill-rate as related to ROPs and TMUs, and then proceed to have a list that includes those, and adds in shader units.

Next, when the mention of "pixel pipelines" comes up, I think it should mention the GeForce 7 as the first to go "fragmented;" I highly doubt that, with 24 TMUs/PSUs, and only 16 ROPs, that it could be an arcitecture that's anything but. Also, tracing through history, "pipeline" count has been fairly accurate to either two things: (when applicable) the number of ROPs, and the number of pixel shader units.

It could also be dangerous to imply that "24-pipeline" cards would be generally superior to all "16-pipeline" cards, particularly given that Radeon X1900s are generally considered "16-pipeline," rather than "48-pipeline."

The bit on manufacturing processes is right on, though I might add something in parenthasis to make sure the reader knows that "µ" stands for the prefix "micro-" 😛

As for the section on memory interfaces, I can't quite write it out, (partially because I'm falling asleep as I write this) but there's got to be a better way to explain how bit width is very important, perhaps involving a statement outright telling that bit width is the number of bits that the VRAM can transfer per clock cycle.

Fortunately, I'm glad to see that the article covered the all-important issue of some people being confused by seeing "half-speed" reported for their DDR VRAM. Though it might be wise to start including "GDDR4" in that list, given that it appears to be only a month or two away.

As for the whole long page on Direct3D and shader models, I must congratulate the writer of the article on that; I especially liked the animated example of differences, and I'm suprised that so much detail could be retained in just 256 colors. It might've also been a good idea to mention DirectX 9.0b and the accompanying SM 2.0b, but since it doesn't really ever have much of an impact on gamers, as far as they're concerned, perhaps it was right to leave it out.

However, I must correct the article on the mention of HDR. While I'm glad to see that the writer recognized that OpenEXR was developed for movies, not games, it is not used by Oblivion, at least if the game's developers are to be believed; while functionally and statistically, it seems to be identical, Bethesda purports that it is a shader they developed in-house, and hence not found elsewhere. (though in 2005, they reported they used a SM 2.0 version, so it may be that they simply ditched it, and licensed OpenEXR, though they make no mention of it in the credits/etc.)

Oh, and on the section of "AA," an embarrasing mistake was made:

Aliasing (abbreviated 'AA') is a term to describe jagged or blocky patterns associated with displaying digital images.

AA is for anti-aliasing, not aliasing. 😛 It might also have been a good idea to give a basic description of HOW it works, (and hence why it increases the workload on the GPU) even if it was a mere sentence describing how it effectively draws each pixel multiple times, from a slightly different vantage, and blends them together.

Oh, and the bit on texture filtering, I'm afraid to say, should probably be just thrown out and re-written from scratch. It describes texture filtering as being invented to combat mip-mapping blur, when that's what anisotropic and trilinear filtering are for; each needs its own description. Perhaps some info can be shamelessly taken from This excellent THG article that I've often referenced?

Oh, and that image demonstrating AF x16, in contrast to the one demonstrating different shader models, completely sucks. Even I had a hard time discerning that it was, indeed, AF x16. (I can tell AF levels apart from a screenshot) Perhaps a different scene, or even a different game, should've been used. I might recommend Morrowind, or perhaps Oblivion, though Morrowind makes mip-mapping far more apparent. Like the article I linked above, it should show the difference between no filtering, and various types/levels of filtering.

Anyway, all in all, this is a great article. Obviously nothing I didn't already know, but I think it might prove rather helpful for countless people who are new to this sort of thing. Keep it up, and I eagerly await Part III! 😀

 

[yyrkoon]

However, I must correct the article on the mention of HDR. While I'm glad to see that the writer recognized that OpenEXR was developed for movies, not games, it is not used by Oblivion, at least if the game's developers are to be believed; while functionally and statistically, it seems to be identical, Bethesda purports that it is a shader they developed in-house, and hence not found elsewhere. (though in 2005, they reported they used a SM 2.0 version, so it may be that they simply ditched it, and licensed OpenEXR, though they make no mention of it in the credits/etc.)

Well according to the Bethesda web site, and a Link I found a few months ago, they didnt even write the graphics 'engine' for thier own game, but rather used a third party 'engine'. SO personally, I find it highly unlikly that they wrote any graphics routines for thier own game (other than perhaps enumeration graphics devices). Then again, I'm not a game dever, so what do I know =/

 

[Empty_V0id]

A good read for beginners like myself and a good refresher for those who have been doing this for a while.

 

[enewmen]

Simple question.

How is graphics memory used? For screen size? For texture size?
I think it's for screen size because I can for example play HL2 at MAX settings when my video card is only 64meg and screen size is only 1 mega-pixel.
Am I missing something?

Thanks!

 

[nukemaster]

at lower screen sizes the game may be running lower textures.

I would say most of the memory goes to textures..

A good article either way.....

 

[nottheking]

Well according to the Bethesda web site, and a Link I found a few months ago, they didnt even write the graphics 'engine' for thier own game, but rather used a third party 'engine'. SO personally, I find it highly unlikly that they wrote any graphics routines for thier own game (other than perhaps enumeration graphics devices). Then again, I'm not a game dever, so what do I know =/

Yes, Bethesda did license out the GameBryo engine from Emergent Technologies. However, I know that they did write most of their shaders. And they have reported using their own HDR shader, though they made no further mention on that specific question within a few months of the release.

I would know, as I paid a LOT of attention to this game since it was announced.

Simple question.

How is graphics memory used? For screen size? For texture size?
I think it's for screen size because I can for example play HL2 at MAX settings when my video card is only 64meg and screen size is only 1 mega-pixel.
Am I missing something?

Thanks!

Well, it's used for all of them, and the ratio would depend on the game in question.

If, say, you're using an emulator for an old console, such as the original Playstation or the Nintendo64, where the PSX only had 512KB of VRAM, and the N64 likely never allocated more than 2-3MB of its RDRAM to textures, (unless you had the N64 expansion pack) and you run at a 1+ megapixel resolution, you're going to be using more memory for the frame buffer than for textures.

Likewise, this can shift according to the game; the use of other rendering buffers, which work just like the final frame buffer, may change depending on the shaders used for rendering; things like cube-mapped reflections require their own buffer space for rendering their scene; hence, in a scene with that reflective water, you're rendering everything twice. Shadow-maps, (as opposed to shadow stencils) as used in many games, also require their own rendering space.

 

[shushikiary]

When it comes to AF, looking very closely at the picture I do notice a difference. It's almost as if AF is acting as a high pass filter on the image, and then adding the high pass back into the image (aka a sharpening filter), but it also looks as if it does some gamma correction as well. To my eyes it seems it does improve the image considerably, though maybe not at a glance, but when really looking at it, it does.
See, after they do the low pass filter (AA) to prevent aliasing (as you can have aliasing in images just like sound) it is good to try to bring back some of the high frequency part of the image, so I think the AF does a good job of this by applying the sharpening effect that it apears to do. At least that's my opinion


Also, I think the reason why so much memory is needed for large resolution images, is that you have to remember that there is at least 3x the image data for each pixel, the combination of each pixel is from a color map that typically has red, green, and blue info, and if each of those is 32 bit... then for 1900x1200 reslolution you need 1900x1200x3x4 = 27,360,000 = 27 megs of memory, for 1 frame... now if you need to do 30 of those a second.... yea that's alot of memory. Not ot mention that when you do your filters on the data you need more space, as you have to padd them out to get the filters work right many times, as say an FIR (finite impulse response) filter for an image would get rid of some of the data on the edges as you go through the fitlering, so you have to padd the image. On top of this, to do a filter, many times you have to muliply a matrix times some part of the image, then add it with a previous muliplied part, aka it's a sum of products (called convolution), then shift it over a pixel, and repeat until the multipling matrix has been multiplied times the entire image. To do that, you need ALOT of memory, processing power, etc. This is why filters need so much processing power and memory.... At least, that's how I would explain it....

 

[cleeve]

Does nVidia actually state somewhere that the texture fill-rate has to do with "pixel pipelines" and actually differentiates these from TMUs?

Good question. That puzzled me a bit too, it was edited in after I submitted the article I think... don't remember writing that.

Next, when the mention of "pixel pipelines" comes up, I think it should mention the GeForce 7 as the first to go "fragmented;" I highly doubt that, with 24 TMUs/PSUs, and only 16 ROPs, that it could be an arcitecture that's anything but. Also, tracing through history, "pipeline" count has been fairly accurate to either two things: (when applicable) the number of ROPs, and the number of pixel shader units.

I believe the ROPs have been detached from everything else for quite a while; I imagine this is because some pixels may have to go through multiple passes before they're rasterized? That's just a total guess though.

It could also be dangerous to imply that "24-pipeline" cards would be generally superior to all "16-pipeline" cards, particularly given that Radeon X1900s are generally considered "16-pipeline," rather than "48-pipeline."

Well, the way the article is written it explains that the X1x00 series doesn't apply to the 'pipeline' term very well, hopefully readers will take that to heart.

The bit on manufacturing processes is right on, though I might add something in parenthasis to make sure the reader knows that "µ" stands for the prefix "micro-" 😛

If they don't know that, they probably don't know 'micro' means 'millionth' anyway, so screw 'em.

Fortunately, I'm glad to see that the article covered the all-important issue of some people being confused by seeing "half-speed" reported for their DDR VRAM. Though it might be wise to start including "GDDR4" in that list, given that it appears to be only a month or two away.

Yeah, another thing for the list of addendums.

However, I must correct the article on the mention of HDR. While I'm glad to see that the writer recognized that OpenEXR was developed for movies, not games, it is not used by Oblivion, at least if the game's developers are to be believed;

Wow... Ill look into that.

Oh, and on the section of "AA," an embarrasing mistake was made:Aliasing (abbreviated 'AA') is a term to describe jagged or blocky patterns associated with displaying digital images.

AA is for anti-aliasing, not aliasing. 😛

Yep, 'Anti' definitely missing there.

Oh, and the bit on texture filtering, I'm afraid to say, should probably be just thrown out and re-written from scratch. It describes texture filtering as being invented to combat mip-mapping blur, when that's what anisotropic and trilinear filtering are for; each needs its own description. Perhaps some info can be shamelessly taken from This excellent THG article that I've often referenced?

Hmmm. I'll have a second look at it.

Oh, and that image demonstrating AF x16, in contrast to the one demonstrating different shader models, completely sucks.

Yeah, I've already promised grape I'd redo the AF animation. 😛 That one is a victim of tight timelines but it's not so good and needs to be redone...

 

[nottheking]

When it comes to AF, looking very closely at the picture I do notice a difference. It's almost as if AF is acting as a high pass filter on the image, and then adding the high pass back into the image (aka a sharpening filter), but it also looks as if it does some gamma correction as well. To my eyes it seems it does improve the image considerably, though maybe not at a glance, but when really looking at it, it does.
See, after they do the low pass filter (AA) to prevent aliasing (as you can have aliasing in images just like sound) it is good to try to bring back some of the high frequency part of the image, so I think the AF does a good job of this by applying the sharpening effect that it apears to do. At least that's my opinion

Well, it is an interesting analogy, though in practice, it really doesn't mean anything in 3D; AA only applies its filtering technique to the EDGES of polygons, while AF only really applies to the BODY of the polygons, where the textures are placed; if you look at the same scene with/without AA, you'd notice it has no impact on the texturing of the image.

Also, I think the reason why so much memory is needed for large resolution images, is that you have to remember that there is at least 3x the image data for each pixel, the combination of each pixel is from a color map that typically has red, green, and blue info, and if each of those is 32 bit... then for 1900x1200 reslolution you need 1900x1200x3x4 = 27,360,000 = 27 megs of memory, for 1 frame... now if you need to do 30 of those a second.... yea that's alot of memory. Not ot mention that when you do your filters on the data you need more space, as you have to padd them out to get the filters work right many times, as say an FIR (finite impulse response) filter for an image would get rid of some of the data on the edges as you go through the fitlering, so you have to padd the image. On top of this, to do a filter, many times you have to muliply a matrix times some part of the image, then add it with a previous muliplied part, aka it's a sum of products (called convolution), then shift it over a pixel, and repeat until the multipling matrix has been multiplied times the entire image. To do that, you need ALOT of memory, processing power, etc. This is why filters need so much processing power and memory.... At least, that's how I would explain it....

That is correct, until you get to the "30 a second" part. Only one frame's worth of memory will ever be used for a frame buffer at a time; after that, it's cleared, and a new frame is written to the same space. That merely has to do with the high requirements for memory bandwidth that games have. And indeed, all those extra shaders, and anything else that adds "overdraw" (where more than one thing affects a pixel) dramatically increase bandwidth usage. This is why the XBox 360 shifted to a "tile-based" GPU; it performs all the basic buffer-writing into a "tile buffer" that is located on the same die as the ROPs, and hence has close to unlimited write bandwidth; the processed frame-fragments are then transfered o the actual VRAM to compose the final frame buffer, significantly reducing memory usage.

Good question. That puzzled me a bit too, it was edited in after I submitted the article I think... don't remember writing that.

I don't remember writing a lot of things I apparently wrote. 😳

I believe the ROPs have been detached from everything else for quite a while; I imagine this is because some pixels may have to go through multiple passes before they're rasterized? That's just a total guess though.

Well, in the stardard sort of rendering process, it appears that each function performed, either by pixel shader or by texturing, is recorded to the VRAM, that's the source of term "overdraw." So in reality, I guess neither of us quite knows.

Wow... Ill look into that.

I think I'll try my hand at it first; (I'm not 100% certain myself on the issue, I'll admit) the developers may still be willing to speak to me, though I haven't a clue how they might take it were I to directly ask them such a question. (they might be more willing to answer a technical question PM if it came from a well-established member of the Elder Scrolls community rather than from an unknown person from the media, particularly if it was only one question)

Yeah, I've already promised grape I'd redo the AF animation. 😛 That one is a victim of tight timelines but it's not so good and needs to be redone...

It did indeed appear rushed, though I'm surprised you were so good at getting a shot that broke down into 8-bit color so easily...

Of course, the alternative would be to use an animated .PNG, and say "screw 'em" to the IE users. 😛

 

[capnbfg]

I did find the difference between 16x AF and none, pretty funny, pretty much what I already had concluded on my own, it basicly gives no improvement, and in return eats CPU/GPU cycles

I would be inclined to disagree with you here. The reason you can't see the difference in the article is because the two screenshots they gave were not good examples. Look at these images and tell me that you can't see a difference:

Bilinear

Trilinear

2xAniso

4xAniso

8xAniso

I left out 16xAniso because the gains over 8x were negligible. It is important to note, however, that these screenshots were taken on a 9800Pro graphics card, and 16xAniso on an X1800/X1900 is a big improvement (look at the THG review of the X1800 launch).

Also, these screenshots were not taken for the sole purpose of this thread. I actually took them over a year ago for a presentation about advancements in 3D rendering in one of my technology electives.

Just for the heck of it, here are some shots to show the effects of antialiasing:

No AA

4xAA

Note to any TG employees:
You are free to use these screenshots if you so desire. Let me know if you want to use any of the other shots I took as examples of pixel shaders (heat, vapors, water), sprites (flames, explosions), or bump mapping. I'd be happy to send them to you.

 

[DPolkowski]

Does nVidia actually state somewhere that the texture fill-rate has to do with "pixel pipelines" and actually differentiates these from TMUs? I think it may simply be the case that nVidia, since they have shown to be TMU-centric in their designs, they may consider TMUs to BE the pixel pipelines, and perhaps it might just be best to trim that section to reduce possible confusion.

Not in any papers I have from Nvidia. I have spoken to Ugesh Desi and Nick Stam on occasions about their calculations. Insted of listening to the marketing and PR machinery I choose to go beyond that to find out. In conversations they have confirmed this is the way they count their texture fill rate. On the other side guys like Guennadi Riguer and David Nalasco have given me the way ATI does things.


As for the deal with S-Video... that is to the web team and will get fixed.

 

[yyrkoon]

Well according to the Bethesda web site, and a Link I found a few months ago, they didnt even write the graphics 'engine' for thier own game, but rather used a third party 'engine'. SO personally, I find it highly unlikly that they wrote any graphics routines for thier own game (other than perhaps enumeration graphics devices). Then again, I'm not a game dever, so what do I know =/

Yes, Bethesda did license out the GameBryo engine from Emergent Technologies. However, I know that they did write most of their shaders. And they have reported using their own HDR shader, though they made no further mention on that specific question within a few months of the release.

I would know, as I paid a LOT of attention to this game since it was announced.

Well, I wasnt doubting what you wrote, and now that I think about it, I think I've heard what you said about the shaders somewhere else also. What I was writting was more targeted at doubting what bethesda was saying (as per what you were saying), but honestly I dont know, maybe they did write all that stuff, and thats why Oblivion is such a PoS at the moment. The game is ridden with bugs, and performance wise it could be alot better IMO, but then again, I also realize its not a FPS game. Anyhow, even though I personally havent experienced the plethora of bugs alot of others have (although the random CTD's, and corrupted saves are really annoying), I dont even play the game anymore, I just dont find it all that fun any longer.

 

[nottheking]

I would be inclined to disagree with you here. The reason you can't see the difference in the article is because the two screenshots they gave were not good examples. Look at these images and tell me that you can't see a difference:

<snip>

I left out 16xAniso because the gains over 8x were negligible. It is important to note, however, that these screenshots were taken on a 9800Pro graphics card, and 16xAniso on an X1800/X1900 is a big improvement (look at the THG review of the X1800 launch).

Good shots you took; I hoped you aced that elective.

As for the bit on x16 AF, I've found that there IS a difference, though at even obscene resolutions, it's not noticable, but rather, counter-acts the purpose of mip-mapping, resulting in the infamous "crackle" you get looking at distant textures, as it rapidly shifts between multiple texels that fall within that particular pixel. Hence, I typically leave it AF at x8 simply for that.

Not in any papers I have from Nvidia. I have spoken to Ugesh Desi and Nick Stam on occasions about their calculations. Insted of listening to the marketing and PR machinery I choose to go beyond that to find out. In conversations they have confirmed this is the way they count their texture fill rate. On the other side guys like Guennadi Riguer and David Nalasco have given me the way ATI does things.


As for the deal with S-Video... that is to the web team and will get fixed.

Okay, thank you for clearing that bit up.

Well, I wasnt doubting what you wrote, and now that I think about it, I think I've heard what you said about the shaders somewhere else also. What I was writting was more targeted at doubting what bethesda was saying (as per what you were saying), but honestly I dont know, maybe they did write all that stuff, and thats why Oblivion is such a PoS at the moment. The game is ridden with bugs, and performance wise it could be alot better IMO, but then again, I also realize its not a FPS game. Anyhow, even though I personally havent experienced the plethora of bugs alot of others have (although the random CTD's, and corrupted saves are really annoying), I dont even play the game anymore, I just dont find it all that fun any longer.

Indeed, Oblivion's technical state is amazingly bad for a top-shelf title; I was quite shocked. Performance-wise, it's what might be expected for the obscene amount of shaders used, though I frown upon the rediculously flimsy LOD scaling for objects, that feels more fitting for the year 2001 than 2006. Also, I hate that shadows aren't actually filtered, but simply done like F.E.A.R.'s, only with shadow-maps rather than stencil volumes.

And as far as bugs... I can't believe they considered it done. Perhaps this is the part where I can repeatedly tell them, "I told you so!" 😛

I still play it, but because of the flawed state of it, it's nowhere near as fun as either Daggerfall or Morrowind were. Even though I only got a corrupted save once. (an auto-save I got entering a shop, when it CTD'd while loading the cell)

 

[twile]

Also, I think the reason why so much memory is needed for large resolution images, is that you have to remember that there is at least 3x the image data for each pixel, the combination of each pixel is from a color map that typically has red, green, and blue info, and if each of those is 32 bit... then for 1900x1200 reslolution you need 1900x1200x3x4 = 27,360,000 = 27 megs of memory, for 1 frame... now if you need to do 30 of those a second.... yea that's alot of memory. Not ot mention that when you do your filters on the data you need more space, as you have to padd them out to get the filters work right many times, as say an FIR (finite impulse response) filter for an image would get rid of some of the data on the edges as you go through the fitlering, so you have to padd the image. On top of this, to do a filter, many times you have to muliply a matrix times some part of the image, then add it with a previous muliplied part, aka it's a sum of products (called convolution), then shift it over a pixel, and repeat until the multipling matrix has been multiplied times the entire image. To do that, you need ALOT of memory, processing power, etc. This is why filters need so much processing power and memory.... At least, that's how I would explain it....

That is correct, until you get to the "30 a second" part.
:? I'm confused now. I had always thought that the 32 bit color we used was 8 bits per color channel, RGB, and 8 bits for the alpha channel (which wouldn't even really apply to frames ready to be displayed). So I thought it was 1900x1200 pixels at 24 bits = 3 bytes, or 1900x1200x3 = 6.84 MiB (Mebibytes, not Men in Black) = 6.52 MB. But now I hear it would be 27 MB which is like 4 times larger? :? Can someone explain this to me?

Just for the heck of it, here are some shots to show the effects of antialiasing:

No AA

4xAA

I'm with you in that AA makes a big difference. It makes less of a difference when you use a CRT at a high resolution, or play a game with lots of movement, but if you use an LCD (especially 19" with 1280x1024, where pixels are obviously bigger than on a 17" with 1280x1024) or experience any periods of time when you're not whirling around after being shot at, you will notice it... especially if you're used to AA.

You should note, however, that you're using the X800 generation of cards like me. Modern cards can anti-alias textures with alpha channels if I'm not mistaken. In the screenshots you showed off, the chain link fence is aliased because they chose to make it a see-through texture rather than a bunch of T&L polygons. So people should know that even your screenshot could be improved upon significantly by smoothing out those fence lines and the diagonal supports for that power infrastructure (especially noticable against the AA'd vertical bars which Valve did have the sense to make out of polygons). Another notable thing: One big problem that thin lines like with the chain link fence is that, as you get far away from them, they can start to disappear and reappear seemingly at random when they're less than 1 pixel wide. This is quite visible with your AA'd screenshot where areas of the fence seem to just disappear.

 

[cleeve]

Those are great examples, CapnBFG. Much better than my originals. Thanks for offering to let us use them.

I've turned them into animated GIFs (you might have to click 'em to see them fully sized):

 

[yyrkoon]

Those are great examples, CapnBFG. Much better than my originals. Thanks for offering to let us use them.

I've turned them into animated GIFs (you might have to click 'em to see them fully sized):

This is all fine and dandy, except that AF does NOT make anywhere near that much difference on my system, but AA does, albiet not much since I play games normally at 1440x900, it is however noticable. I must say though, I dont know what resolution you used for those shots, but it seems very low res, because even with AA off, on my system, the screenshots would look no where near that bad, even IF I were using a non optimal resolution for my monitor.

 

[yyrkoon]

Ah. ok, I see, you zoomed, which pretty much defeats the purpose of the whole discussion, of course its going to look worse.

Heres an example of what my screen looks like while playing Oblivion (sorry for the text, I was doing some testing).

This is no AA, and no AF. As you can see, unless you get RIGHT UP to the monitor, all those jaggies are pretty hard to see. As for the FPS, well this is what I have to live with when fighting a whole city at once in Oblivion 😉

 

[cleeve]

Ah. ok, I see, you zoomed, which pretty much defeats the purpose of the whole discussion, of course its going to look worse.

The AF comparison is not Zoomed, it's cropped... big difference.
The texture blurriness can easily be seen in the screenshot above at it's regular resolution with no AF.
That's 1280x960, too... a very reasonable resolution. That Anistropic filtering comparison is exactly what you'd see in game. It surprised you that it's so dramatic, didn't it? I guess AF is a pretty nice feature after all.

I zoomed in the AA comparison, but it clearly says so on the screenshot. I personally find AA makes a big differrence, even at 1600x resolution.

But of course, it's subjective. I find the oblivion screenshot very blurry on the road texture as it goes off in the distance - AF would help that alot, like in the animated gif. And I think some AA wouldn't hurt there either, the aliasing is pretty obvious on some things, like the edge of the road.

 

[twile]

I wish I could use AA and AF on my system, but 1600x1200 with an X800 XT tends to push my computer to its limits as is with modern games. Ahhh, back in the days of the 9700 Pro, I could play the newest games at 1280x1024 with 6x AA and 16x AF with wonderful framerates. The memories!

 

[yyrkoon]

Ah. ok, I see, you zoomed, which pretty much defeats the purpose of the whole discussion, of course its going to look worse.

The AF comparison is not Zoomed, it's cropped... big difference.
The texture blurriness can easily be seen in the screenshot above at it's regular resolution with no AF.
That's 1280x960, too... a very reasonable resolution. That Anistropic filtering comparison is exactly what you'd see in game. It surprised you that it's so dramatic, didn't it? I guess AF is a pretty nice feature after all.

I zoomed in the AA comparison, but it clearly says so on the screenshot. I personally find AA makes a big differrence, even at 1600x resolution.

But of course, it's subjective. I find the oblivion screenshot very blurry on the road texture as it goes off in the distance - AF would help that alot, like in the animated gif. And I think some AA wouldn't hurt there either, the aliasing is pretty obvious on some things, like the edge of the road.

Well, not pointing at anyone specificly, but there comes a point where trying to get your game looking absolutely perfect, it becomes obsession. Then the point is, WHY on gods earth are you even bothering with games . . . because obviously, you're not enjoying it.

[EDIT]

Really I wasnt paying so much attention to the AF as the AA, and when I mentioned 'zoomed' I was talking specificly of AA.

The blurry roads in Oblivion has more to do with poor textures than AF, trust me, I've tweaked Oblivion to hell and back, and that screen is basicly where I found my sweet spot for performance / looks. Anyhow, Ive loaded second party texture packs, and the roads DO look much better, albiet, even just creeping around in the wilderness, I get 5 FPS...

This is everything maxed out running the first beta patch, And as you probably already have noticed, I havent even used LOD texture packs for this screenshot. There comes a point in time when you're a gamer, that you have to just remind yourself there is only so much your hardware can do, and just enjoy the game.

 

[Sokolum]

This was a very nice read... liked it a lot, thnx.