Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering in Entropia Universe (Tutorial)

[ZarathustrA]

Hello all!

I thought I would write a simple tutorial/explanation about anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering (AA & AF) since not everyone knows what it is. Many gamers know what it means but in PE (I will always call it that! hah!) we don't get the option of changing AA & AF ingame, so if PE is the only game you play you'll, normally, never get to experience this.

I'll explain what they both mean in the best way I can.

Anti-Aliasing: When a texture gets expanded too much it will run out of data, the same way a picture will look pixelated when blown up larger than its native resolution. The video game equivilant of that is aliasing. What we see is jagged edges around things in-game.

This is a screenshot from PE with AA off.



Here is one with AA at 4x, obviously much smoother.



Anti-aliasing blends the shapes accordingly by blurring the colors.
2x or 4x are simply how many times it runs over the screen. Obviously the more times it runs over it the better it looks.. Well, from the standard options available that is. I'm sure the blurring would have a negative effect if run over an image 50 times. This all looks much more impressive when you're running around in-game, you'll wonder how you lived without it!

Anisotropic Filtering: To help reduce lag in video games textures will "degrade" the further away you get from them. They will look blurry and plain because less detail is needed now that they are off in the distance.

Here is a picture of a dry, dusty landscape with some water off in the distance.



Notice the dirt has less and less detail the further away it is and the water looks plain and un-detailed?

This is the picture with AF at 16x.



The landscape now has much better detail at a distance and the water has that lovely texture we all like.

I still don't fully understand anisotropic-filtering but I definetly can see the difference. For this one I'll let Wikipedia do the talking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

The below links are other ones I read up on before posting this.
The Bit-Tech article is a great read too if you want to learn a bit more in-depth about AA & AF.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...ltering/1.html

For those that just want to play with better graphics, read on!

So how do you go about turning these graphic enhancements on? Simple! You cannot do these within PE so it all must be "forced" outside of PE.

Nvidia Users:

1. Right click an empty section of your desktop & click 'Properties'

2. In the window that pops up goto the 'Settings' tab and click 'Advanced'

3. Click the button labeled with the name of your graphics card, in my case 'GeForce 6800 GT'

4. Now click the 'Performance and Quality Settings' option on the left

5. Now click on the option you want to change, 'Anti-aliasing Settings' or 'Anisotropic Filtering'

6. Uncheck 'Application Controlled', this allows you to force the settings for every game you run. You will have to do this for both AA and AF

7. Move the slider upto 4x for AA and 16x for AF; You can choose lower values if you find the game running too slow after the changes, or higher values if your video card permits.

ATI Users:

First I must apologize for this section of the tutorial, I do not have an ATI card so I can not present a picture nor have I ever done this on a computer with an ATI card. This is gathered info from the internet along with help from a good friend (I love you Phil!). Hopefully it's all correct and easy to understand.

Update: Pictured added thanks to MistyDawn!

1. Right click an empty section of your desktop & click 'ATI Catalyst(tm) Control Center'

2. Click 'View' and goto the 'Graphics Settings'

3. On the left side of the screen locate the '3D' options and expand the list

4. Now click on the option you want to change, 'Anti-Aliasing or 'Anisotropic Filtering'

5. Uncheck 'Let the application decide' and choose the new settings you wish to use for both AA and AF.

Now all you need to do is run PE... err Entropia Universe!

Remember to turn these off before going into another game! If you wonder why Oblivion is all of a sudden laggy, well this is why. You can toy with other games that lack these options though, of course!

AA & AF put more strain on your graphics card so your experiences with these enhancements may be laggy!

PE, luckily, is not a demanding game (when it comes to video cards) so you should be able to turn these on without any, or a barely noticable increase in lag.
A long time ago Gem posted he had more frequent, although still rare, crashes with AA & AF on. Take note that this was long ago in a different graphics engine so this may be irrelevant. Lots of people use these enhancements with no problems at all!

Here are the full resolution pictures I took sections of for this tutorial. The're hosted off site due to being too big to upload here. But I thought I should give you all the option of seeing them full-sized as alot more can be seen than just what I posted!

PE Screenshot AA & AF Off
http://tinyurl.com/mnj4u

PE Screenshot AA 4x & AF 16x
http://tinyurl.com/px8kd

Save them to your desktop and flip between them, that's when you notice how much of a difference it makes!

Have fun and I hope I explained this all in an easy to understand format!

[MindBuster]

For discussion and other members comments please visit this thread...

Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering in Entropia Universe (Tutorial)