nV's AA will work fine on HL2

[BenSkywalker]

Since people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue, I thought I'd update everyone.

1) How bad is the problem?

With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light maps from other polygons.

This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Daikatana, Sin, Elite Force, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on the X-Box, or any game that uses packed lightmaps with multi-sample anti-aliasing.

You would see these artifacts on polygon boundaries where the wrong lightmap is being sampled. It will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a polygon.

Gary McTaggart brought this up in an email because he is being pretty hardcore about graphics quality right now. This is not a new problem. If you've run a game that uses lightmaps with anti-aliasing turned on, then you've been seeing these artifacts the whole time.

Gabe Newell's words.

Apologies if this is a repost, although he just posted himself not that long ago.

 

[Schadenfroh]

and the soap opera continues :beer:

 

[Tab]

Half-Life 2 isnt working FINE....

 

[BenSkywalker]

Half-Life 2 isnt working FINE....

Did you read the entire post? Besides the fact that the current artifacts show up in almost every game out for both ATi and nVidia owners is one point, but Gabe also talks about how they can fix the issue using shaders which would end up with HL2 having *less* AA artifacts then the overwhelming majority of games out now. I'd say that would fall under fine at least 🙂

 

[codehack2]

Originally posted by: Tabb
Half-Life 2 isnt working FINE....

What build are you testing?

No offense, but I'm going to have to go with Gabe on this one.

CH2

 

[Corporate Thug]

here is the biggey

3) How will this look?

We'll release one of the demo movies with the anti-aliasing artifacts in and one with the anti-aliasing changes.