Anti-Aliasing & Antistropic filtering?

[jtelep]

I hope someone can answer how these two things can help my images and what am I doing wrong that causes my card to lock or show a black screen whenever I enable them. OK, I'll admit that I'm no graphics guru and don't really know what taxes the system more, turning all of the effects on or cranking up the resolution to the ceiling (i.e. 1600x1200) I've got a eVGA e-GeForce 6600GT (AGP) and I've tried using both of these options but it seems to send me into never never land when I restart the game with them turned on. I've also noticed that you can set the Anti-Aliasing by factors of 2 so if I turn on all of the bells and whistles (say in a game like Doom3 or KOTOR) and then crank the resolution up to 1600x1200 and then turn on the antistropic filtering and set the anti-aliasing to 4x and then restart the game I can't even get a picture. I'm guessing there's a trade off but don't know where to start making them. Do I need to enable sideband addressing in my BIOS and if so, how do I do it? I don't see any option for that feature. Is it called something else?

Can someone help me and explain what I'm doing wrong?

 

[BFG10K]

Any overclocks/softmods/BIOS flashes? Are you using the latest official drivers from nVidia?

 

[Munky]

Have you tried using a lower resolution with AA and AF enabled. The 6600gt isn't meant to be run at 1600*1200 + AA/AF, although I would think it should still display something, even if it is a slideshow.

 

[jtelep]

No, none at all. Stock/most up-to-date drivers from the eVGA website (71.84 I think). No overclocking, no mods. Any clues.

 

[jtelep]

Just out of cusiousity, how do you knowm that the 6600GT isn't designed to be run at 1600x1200 with AA/AF? I would love to be able to find some specs that tell me what I can reasonably expect from the card and what's not reasonable. Thanks.

 

[kylebisme]

He just means it is a midrage card and those are high end settings. As for information as to what you can reasonably expect from the card, try looking at the benchmarks on this site or any of the hundreds of other sites around the net that do videocard reviews.

 

[Viper96720]

Have you tried leaving them at default and letting the game set the aa and af instead. I usually do that with games unless the game doesn't have those settings. Then I'll use the display settings.

 

[jtelep]

The settings to which I'm referring are within the games options menu. I'm not doing this from the video cards control panel. I was just trying to figure out what I can do with the card. I've noticed in some of these games that you can set these options yourself and if you don't (and you have a performance card) that you will wind up with a pretty lame experience because the default settings in the game are everything set to the lowest and safest settings available.

 

[Pete]

That is strange. First of all, I'd start off with 4xAA and 16xAF at 1024x768, the 6600GT's ideal setting (16x12 is too much both in terms of the 6600GT's speed and its 128MB of memory). I'd also suggest simply reinstalling whatever version of DirectX and ForceWare you have currently installed, or uninstalling your versions and installing the latest.

 

[mehmetmunur]

To my knowledge, the higher the resolution, the more memory and memory bandwidth you will need in order to run the game. Your 6600GT has 128bit memory instead of the 256bit memory that higher end cards do. Also you have 8 pixel pipelines instead of the 12/16 that higher ends come with. Also you are using AGP instead of PCIe which limits the bandwidth available to your card. Therefore, your memory bandwidth is limited to about 14GB/s compared to the 25-26 that higher end cards have. Finally, a game like Doom 3 is meant to run on video cards with 512MB of RAM (if textures are turned on to highest settings), which is not available on gaming video cards yet (I think NVIDIA just launched one but I do not think it was just a paper launch). Because your card is lacking in these features, you will experience problems with your games on high resolutions and high texture levels, and high Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings. I would turn down the textures to medium, keep your resolution around 1280*768, 1280*1024.

Also make sure that you have the latest patches for these games as well. For example Far Cry is known to have issues with lightning in high settings. Furthermore, KOTOR 2 is known to be rushed and has many stability problems to my knowledge. Try running 3DMark and see if you experience any problems, in which case there might be something wrong with your card.

Anandtech has a few articles about CPU and VGA benchmarks on Doom, WoW, and Far Cry. You should take a look at those to see where your system should perform for comparison. You will see that 6600Gt takes a beating in terms of frames per second when AA/AF settings are turned on in any game

I hope none of the information I give you was wrong since I am no guru myself. I hope it helps out.

 

[jtelep]

No, that's great info actually. I really didn't know what this card could do and I bought it to replace a 4200Ti w/64MB. I figured it would definitely kick the snot out of my 4200 I just didn't know by how much. I have run both 3dMark 2003/2005 against the card and never experienced any problems. I just wanted to know how much of a boost I could expect over my 4200. Believe it or not I can run Doom3 with the Ultra high quality setting in 1600x1200 and it only slows down every now and then. I didn't start seeing issues until I turned on the AA/AF. I was just kind of frustrated when I asked Doom3 to scan my hardware and pick the setting most appropriate for my card and it chose 'medium' which is what it chose for my 4200 as well! I figured that couldn't be right so that's when I started increasing the setting myself. But I guess the real question would be: "Where would the motivation to buy a more high-end card be if you could run games like Doom3 with all of the features cranked to the ceiling on a card like the 6600GT." I'll turn down the screen res and then try turning on the AA/AF a little bit at a time until I get something that runs reasonably well. Thanks for all of your help!

 

[Rage187]

I was just kind of frustrated when I asked Doom3 to scan my hardware and pick the setting most appropriate for my card and it chose 'medium' which is what it chose for my 4200 as well!

Maybe because its a mid range card