holy cow using AF can really make a massive visual improvement

[ShadowOfMyself]

Yup, that card is the reason why I’ve been running 16xAF since 2002.

Indeed, ever since then there really is no reason not to use 16xAF... The lack of a performance drop given such a huge increase in quality is almost too good to be true

 

[slag]

Nop.. I did not plan on unlocking, I am happy with how this thing OC's(I can OC to 4.2GHz with slight bump in Vcore). It does unlock to an X4.. but the 4th core is unstable, and Gigabyte boards do not support unlocking individual cores. Being a major in statistics helps .. I bought this is as X2.

Yes they do.

I can unlock individual cores on my processors with gigabyte boards.

 

[Skurge]

game and driver updates fixed that at least for Nvidia. the game runs just the same now in the frost levels as it does anywhere else.

Haven't played the game in years so I wouldn't know. Warhead didn't have that problem. Im still surprised that some games don't have AF in the game settings. It should be mandatory by know IMO.

 

[busydude]

I can unlock individual cores on my processors with gigabyte boards.

Really? I haven't looked much into it..

 

[Skurge]

Really? I haven't looked much into it..

I needed to update my ASUS bios to get the feature.

 

[Concillian]

AF is big, and often screenshots do not tell the whole story. smoothing the texture transitions between 'quality zones' makes a huge improvement in actual play. Much, much more noticeable than AA IMO. Night and day difference.

Not even any real performance hit on cards of today.

 

[Ken g6]

I know AA is Anti-Aliasing. What's AF? Wikipedia suggests "Autofocus".

Edit: Got it.

 

[drizek]

I've been using 16x AF on every game for the past 6 years or so. The performance impact is negligible.

 

[soccerballtux]

I normally run 16x AF in games either through the game or forced through the control panel. most of the time I never think about it but it sure does make a massive visual improvement in an older game like Mafia. and these screens got resized but at 1920x1080 is even more noticeable.

not trolling here, I noticed this change with diff nv driver versions on my 9800gt back in the day. Driver "optimizations".

 

[Throckmorton]

Any reason not to turn on antisotropic optimization in the driver settings? (nVidia)

 

[OVerLoRDI]

I didn't really realize this either. I forced AF on Earth 2160 when I played it last night, it really brought the old graphics to life. Lesson learned.

 

[Cerb]

Any reason not to turn on antisotropic optimization in the driver settings? (nVidia)

Yes. With it on, I find that many outdoor games look worse, as the terrain will have a fuzzy/aliased contrast to it. You can't see it so well in screenshots, but when actually moving around, outdoor games that rely on ground textures (games with more shader-heavy terrain seem less affected, but it could be more detailed textures to sample from, as well, since that generally means a newer game) will have some planes that are highly aliased, such they will have almost a sparkly look to them.

Games without subtle changes in angle--most indoor games, and strategy type games--and games that rely on shaders for terrain detail, benefit, in theory, in terms of performance. With GT/GTS/GTX 200 or newer, I'm not that means anything, though.

Usually, a scene is generated using multiple texture stages. Each texture stage applies another layer onto the scene. Another common name for this is "Multitexturing". Examples of such texture stages are the diffuse map (general look and color of the objects), lighting map (the effect of lights on the scene), normal maps (the "bumpiness" of objects) etc. Some games use 8 or more texture stages. Only one texture stage, the diffuse texture map, is always required, to give the objects their appearance.

Most of these texture stages are not receptive for the negative effects of a missing trilinear filter (see above for details about these effects). Usually, it's only the diffuse map, who suffers the most if no trilinear filter is applied.

If a game takes full control over the filtering, it can tell the driver exactly which filter should be applied to each texture stage. This is the best way, because no performance is wasted for using advanced filters for stages that don't benefit from them, while still resulting in the best image quality. That is also the reason why it's always better to use an in-game setting for the anisotropic filter, if the game offers it, and not the driver setting or nHancer.

If you force the anisotropic filter using the driver (or nHancer), there's no way to tell for which texture stages the filter should be applied to. So if you disable the Anisotropic Filter optimization, the driver applies a full anisotropic and trilinear filter for all texture stages.

If you enable this optimization, the full trilinear, anisotropic filter will only be applied to the first texture stage, which is used for the diffuse maps in most games. All other stages only receive a reduced, bilinear anisotropic filter. This is fine as long as a game is really using the first texture stage for the diffuse map, but there are some games, which use a different stage for the diffuse map. In these cases, this optimization will cause a very visible "bow wash" effect, just like it was explained above.

-Enhancer docs

Though, it also says "(no longer available in Forceware 96 and later)," yet I started using Windows again with ~230 drives, and there sure was that setting...

Also, IMO, older games, where texture detail is not terribly high, greatly benefit from setting the texture filtering setting to high quality.