To any Dev out there with a conscience, add diasable AA to your roadmap topics

the bigggest slowdown on lower end computers is any form of anti aliasing.

please give us the option. whats will it hurt?

I want to be able to turn it off, it blurs everything and I can't see, my laptop screen is not super HD so you can imagine how blurry it is with this forced thing on. I am on the lowest possible settings, this is the only thing that makes it look bad. If you are at it, let us turn off the new added teleporter effects because it eats my already not so good CPU too much, it wasn't in before GU3, performance was much better without it. Why the f*ck are you keep adding impossible to turn off effects?

That is correct - it's roughly 2-3% (if you included the entire cost of the combined GPU operation).

lol how many people read the whole thing just to read what the dev had to say?

I appreciate all of your replies and the detail which you place in them. I do have two questions for you though.

1. Why did people report huge gains in performance by using SweetFX if disabling the current form of AA would only increase performance by 2-3% (if I understood your wizard talk correctly)? Were they telling dirty lies?

2. If SweetFX is actually helping performance (and does nothing more than enhance performance) why is it a bannable offense to use it? I (and I assume many others) value performance more than jagged edges.

performance improvement is cumulative. if you can squeeze 2-3%, why not? its these tiny improvements that add up over the months, right?

I don't give a monkeys about AA but I love the title of this thread. As if it is immoral and all devs will burn because they haven't got an AA tickbox in the options.

I didn't even know it was forced, this explains why I can not break 50 FPS on this game no matter what settings I have... Please get rid of this I would love more then 25 FPS in fire fights. Smoother fire fights means a more enjoyable game for me.

Being able to toggle AA has been an option in PC games for as long as I can remember, and people have been asking for it since beta. Especially once it was made clear that running SweetFX isn't allowed.

I mean as far as shader based AA goes PS2's implementation is really good, but it's still "fake" AA and it shows. I'd rather be able to run my card's hardware AA instead, or leave it off entirely.

That would be 2-3% on the GPU side, I think almost everyone is CPU bound in this game so it really wouldn't make any difference.

It would not make any real performance impact, that is true BUT from a visual point of view, the game would be 10 times better to look at. I prefer edges to a blurry mess.

Every little bit counts.

Let us disable AA even if it does not help our FPS right now.

...because it will when the CPU bottleneck goes away!

Running Nvidia GTX680's in SLI fixes the graphic isues. Normally get 100+ fps.

I agree. The only reason I used SweetFX back when it was still allowed was to undo some of the blur with the LumaSharpen filter. It made a huge difference for me.

And honestly I'd rather turn AA off completely. Aliasing doesn't bother me, I don't even notice it unless I'm standing completely still. If it's a choice between vaseline or some jagged edges I'll take the jaggies any day.

Agreed.

Edit: I didn't even know about SweetFX back then :/.

I for one only read it b/c someone from SOE contributed. (it doesn't happen enough IMO)

Thank you for the reply and asking for us. Many many thanks.

Is that why AA cannot be disabled as is, cause it breaks the rendering pipeline?

What affect did changing the games graphics.ini do to the pipeline? Did it just break the shaderAA or did it break the shader AA and a whole list of things down the graphics pipeline engine?

I can answer this

When people are getting huge gains with SweetFX, its cause they are currently GPU limited in the situation they are in.

Because they are GPU limited, when you disable the game's AA, your framerate shoots way up

For huge, huge, huge battles though, your GPU doesn't become the bottleneck, your CPU does , even if your CPU is not at 100%. This is because your CPU is sitting and waiting for information for the server to send you. That's why everyone at the crown gets pretty much the exact same FPS with high end computers (25-38FPS)

For a large majority of people they are playing on older or underpowered GPU hardware, sweetFX improves their framerate by disabling the AA. Since its disabled, your GPU is free to render as is. So area's where you are not CPU limited your GPU can stretch its legs.

As for number 2) They said that sweetFX is a bannable offense because they have a strict no tollerance against 3rd party mods for the game. They know you are not cheating with SweetFX, but because no mods are allowed they ban for it. They personally have nothing against sweetFX (A lot of dev's use it even) but its a zero tolerance thing, not a personal issue or think you are cheating with it.

CyclesMcHurtz is doing a really good job as a coding side representative on the official forums. He's got enough detail in the posts, explains reasonings and seems to be reading more threads than he can reply to.

The PR dudes also do well in this respect, but they obviously can't answer the same questions, or will have to do so indirectly by first asking the team, which is obviously less efficient (and prone to misunderstandings).

On this subject, I don't think I've ever heard of an instance when a player was banned for using it. I don't remember any threads at least.

Anti aliasing OP pls nerf