What does clicking the Application Preference do on the ATI control panel?

[1ManArmY]

I know this maybe a stupid question but it is not straight forward. What do you have to do to benchmark games with no AA/AF? I thought that if you checked application preference the game or benchmark would apply AF only to the textures that need it. Can you help me get this straight. If AF and AA is lefted unchecked what is the outcome no AA/AF or are they running at 2X?

 

[1ManArmY]

can I please get some clarification.

 

[YBS1]

Application Preference will result in AA/AF being turned off in games that do not specifically call for a certain degree of AA/AF in game preferences, configuation files, etc. For example, UT2003 will always be using some degree of AF, as it's called for in the configuation file...you would have to edit that file and set the control panel to app. preference to turn AF off. There is no "force off" option in the control panel, though application preference will result as this in most situations. Rage3D Tweaker may be able to force AA/AF off, I've not checked.

 

[BFG10K]

The Application Preference setting allows the game to control the function and if the game doesn't have a setting for it, it'll be disabled. Using any other setting will cause the drivers to force your setting into all games.

 

[Pete]

If a game allows you to choose AA or AF in-game, then you'll get the best IQ by selecting App Pref in the ATi Ctrl Panel and setting AA/AF via the game. For older games which don't have options for AA/AF, you can only add it via the ATi Ctrl Panel.

There shouldn't be a difference either way with AA, but AF may look better and run slightly slower if you enable it via the game. This really has to do with trilinear filtering: selecting Quality AF via drivers only gives you trilinear on the first MIP-map transition, while doing so in-game (with App Pref) uses tri for the whole scene.