Gabe explains all

[Axyon]

Gabe Newell of Valve Software (http://www.valvesoftware.com) has explained in detail the current FSAA issue on the halflife2.net forums (http://www.halflife2.net/forums)! While the legitimacy of the post cannot be confirmed, it does appear that it is Gabe himself (I feel like such a fool questioning his existance here, sigh ;)).

He explains the problems occuring with AA, and how they can be rectified in the future, so be sure to visit the forums (http://www.halflife2.net/forums) and visit the topic here (http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3071)!

An extract from the thread:

"What are potential solutions?


Support Centroid Sampling
Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinate

Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series. The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.

There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.

Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0."

[The Mullinator]

HOORAY FOR THE BIG MAN!!

At least I hope its actually him, someone should e-mail him and see if he posted here. Just to be certain.

[PSX]

I think it's him; after all, this is around the time that new videos are released, and think about the tons of e-mails/interviews he's answered, there's no doubt that he'd be nice enough to post on one of these forums as well; it sure is written well and goes fairly technical

[The Mullinator]

Ya I have no doubts that its him. Its definatly technical enough to be something that a top programmer would say and I can easily see him posting on fan sites. But under the wild chance that it isn't him this site could look pretty bad.

[DESSTROYER]

what does fsaa stand for? and how do u enable it?

[PSX]

Originally posted by DESSTROYER
what does fsaa stand for? and how do u enable it?
full-scene anti-aliasing

you can usually enable it in your graphic card's control panel, by right-clicking your desktop and going to properties, then settings, and then advanced

some drivers have crappy panels so it may not be there

[DESSTROYER]

i tried enabling it on 2x and then i played cs and then my monitor said no data found or something i guess cause my monitor is too little and what is it supposed to do?

[Submerge]

aight, cool

[PSX]

Originally posted by DESSTROYER
i tried enabling it on 2x and then i played cs and then my monitor said no data found or something i guess cause my monitor is too little and what is it supposed to do?
hmm, not sure what that error means.. I would say try some other games

fsaa doesn't decide what resolution the game runs at; it simply reduces the jaggies in games (many 16-bit games don't work with this, so it doesn't have any effect)

[DESSTROYER]

tried it on sof2 and created my own server used 2x it worked but i didnt see anything much different didnt lag or anything
would it have a effect on the videos on steam?

[PSX]

Originally posted by DESSTROYER
tried it on sof2 and created my own server used 2x it worked but i didnt see anything much different didnt lag or anything
would it have a effect on the videos on steam?
heh, nice try, but it doesn't work in videos, only when your computer is running an app in real-time, opengl/directx, etc.; but, that's a good thing you don't notice any drop in performance; if that's the case, turn on af to 16x (geforce 3s don't handle this well, don't remember about geforce 4 tis) and attempt 4x (most likely you will notice some frame skipping at this level with a gf4 or below/9200 or below); go to fraps.com, download the free version, 1.9D, and have it running while playing; you should see your fps in real-time at the top left corner of your screen in most games; one thing you can do for a thorough test is to check "Enable framerate to be saved every second to FRAPSSEC.TXT" this way it'll copy your frames per second each second into a log in the fraps folder; I'd say if it goes below 30-35 half the time, then your system's being stressed, but at any rate, if it's well playable, you should be ok

[Apos]

The big problem now: the holdup for ATI is MICROSOFT. That sucks: no company is less likely to be helpful or responsive to requests and criticism.

[JackiePrice]

"Trade off some pixel shader bandwidth?" Poor nVidia FX cards are strapped for bandwidth as it is. Welcome to the Half Life 2 slide show...but at least it's anti-aliased!

Or...I could keep my ATI...

[Apos]

http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=8126321

Heh, liked this post "responding" to Gabe's post from Shacknews:

"clamping the textures doesn't take away from the fact that the dotmatrix blip quad 5000 doesn't include texel swaps for bumpmapping coordinates (duh! LOL!)! Remove the pixel shader 2.0 matrix header to get rid of the sub-erection of the triangle tapestry 400 and in essence you have a tri-subdump blip blop bleeh googleplex 9000 explosion."