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That right baby, you just read on !
Direct3D FSAA has been activated in the 5.13 Detonators drivers for
GeForce and TNT(2) based videocards. The Detonator 5.13 drivers have
been leaked yesterday and are available everywhere by now. Since the
5.08 drivers had the option to enable FSAA in OpenGL we logically assumed
that FSAA for Direct3D games should be released quite soon.
After installing the 5.13 drivers we immediately checked the display
properties ... and tataa, our assumption was correct. FSAA can now be
enabled in the OpenGL and Direct3D properties options.
For D3D FSAA go to:
Display Properties/Settings
/Advanced/GeForce
/Additional properties
/Direct3D Settings
/More Direct3D -> tab Antialiasing (upper right
For OpenGL FSAA hop to OpenGL Settings, pull down the slider and flag
Enable full scene antialiasing.
Download
NVidia Beta Detonator 5.13 Windows 95 & 98
UPDATE - I recommend you not to use these new drivers
unless you know what you are doing !! I've been fooling around with them. For some reason FSAA D3D does not
work properly on this machine (3D prophet DDR/DVI). When FSAA is
enabled and set to max then most games will show strange artifacts and
seem to display corrupted images. OpenGL FSAA seems to work good
though.
The drivers also give huge problems with a lot of games with FSAA
Disabled. The drivers are of course leaked BETA drivers so we could
have expected something like this.
Strangely enough some sites have already reported correct D3D FSAA
gaming. We will reinstall the drivers once more quite soon and test it
all again.
If you are trying out these drivers yourself and they seem to work
okay, then please drop me an e-mail with your experiences and system
config. For now I recommend you to stick with your current drivers or
go to the more stable 5.08 Drivers in which you can play OpenGL in
FSAA without problems.
Wow, I've been overwhelmed by all the e-mails I received from you guys
about the new Detonator 5.13 drivers. It seems that alot of you have
these drivers working, but others simple can't get them running.
Anyway, i will post a new Detonator 5.13 page later on this day with
all needed information. For now let us look at some E-mails that i've
received and want to share:
" Hi dude:)
I make some tests with detonators 5.13. I got almost no problems
except for Half-life.
It works only in D3D. The same was with 5.08. It seems to be an opengl
driver bug...
However this is a list of programs, games and Benchmarck i tested with
D3D with and w/out FSAA with different resolutions and color depht -
when possible - :
Half-life 1.0.1.6 (sometimes when switching from game to the
configuration panel, textures goes to hell...)
Unreal 2.25f (no problems)
Unreal Tournament 4.13 (some stuttering)
Rally Championship (no patches applied - no problems)
Need For Speed IV - V (no patches applied - no problems)
Flight Simulator 2000 (no patches applied - no problems)
3DMark 2000 (no patches applied - no problems)
Ultima 9 (latest patch - serious stuttering problems, it may be a RAM
allocation problem)
3D Studio MAX 3.0 (some redrawing problems, it seems FSAA doesn't
work)
Quake 2 3.20 - using Unified 1.20 glide>D3D wrapper (no problems)
All the nVidia D3D demos had no problems
Windows 98 Second edition with the latest drivers was used for the
tests.
The test system:
CPU: Amd Athlon 550 Mhz (no overclocking)
M/B: MSI 6167 rev.3 (AGP set to 1X with sideband enable)
Video card: Creative Annihilator Pro
RAM: 128 Megs PC100-7ns Viking
SCSI Host Ad.: Adaptec 2910
ISDN TA: Mavian Target World 1000 (Asuscom clone)
Sound card: Vortex SQ2550
CDRom: Plextor Ultraplex 18-40x SCSI
CD-R: Plextor Plexwriter 8x2x20
HDD: Quantum Fireball KX 13.6Gb UDMA 66 - 7200 Rpm
FDD: Panasonic (don't know what model ... doesn't matter)
440W home-made power supply "
Then check this one:
" Hi......i have installed the new Detonator 5.13 drivers earlier
today and they smoke. I have a 3D prophet DDR board an a pentium III
500 and they works just fine. I Have played a few games ( Unreal
Tournament, Half Life,......) and had no problems running
them.............at maximum antialiases speed. So far so good!!!!!
"
and then this one :
" Interesting. I don't have the anti-aliasing tab for direct 3d
in my display properties after installation of the 5.13 drivers.
"
next up:
Just like to let you know that I tried enabling FSAA using Detonator
5.13 (with the control panel slider fully to the right) and running
Need For Speed 5 : Porsche Unleashed.
What I noticed is that graphic quality for the cars improved a lot (in
menu screens and game engine), game menu text became a little blurry,
menu GUI slowed down a bit, and ZERO performance hit during races.
Tried resolutions 640x480, 800x600, 1027x768, and all had the same
performance levels.
Maybe it's because ONLY the cars are being anti aliased. Backgrounds
look kinda the same with or without FSAA.
My system specs:
AMD-K62 400mhz
ASUS P5A-B motherboard
128MB RAM
Soundblaster AWE32
Creative 32MB GeForce Pro DDR
And another one:
Just got my Visiontek GeForce 256 from compuplus.com
anyway, go the latest 5.13 detonator drivers for win2k
the fsaa stays on for open gl
but not for Direct X
as soon as i close it they become unchecked
i'd assume they aren't enabled in the win2k drivers...
thanks
EXTensi0n
Okay, that's it for now ... VERY mixed result are coming from these
drivers. However, it proves that you should at least try it out.
If you like to share your opinion
then please e-mail us or go to our forums and where a nice discussion
can be started.
| Full scene anti-aliasing with Detonator 5.08 drivers |
Okay, we promised to get back on this
one ! In short, the new drivers can handle Anti-Aliasing in a Full
Scene. FSAA increases image quality, greatly reducing the number of
"jaggies." Something that 3dfx is hyping up in their new
Voodoo 4 and 5 series cards.
After some serious testing and fooling around with the new Detonator
drivers (released yesterday) Stanley found a registry setting at :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
System\
CurrentControlSet\
Services\
Class\
Display\
0001\
NVidia\
OpenGL\
With a DWORD: EnableFSAA = 0
Logically he assumed this could be a Full Scene Anti-Aliasing setting,
and it is ! And it's actually working with the GeForce (Didn't try on
TNT-2 though, but it should work !).
What you need to do:
- Install the 5.08 Detonators
drivers (download
here)
- Startup an OpenGL game (preferably
Quake III) and then close it again.
- open 'regedit'
goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\
Services\Class\Display\0001\NVidia\OpenGL
(0001) could be 0005 or 0002 or whatever the number is. Check
all entries on the most current detonator installation.
- Double Click on EnableFSAA, and
remove the '0' and make it a '1'
- Close the registry
Now any OpenGL game should work in
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing. You'll notice the best difference in
800x600. If you go any higher then you will loose performance BIGTIME.
In 800x600 it runs pretty much okay though. And yeah .. it makes a
difference. See the screenshots that I took below:
[ Click on the pictures to watch them in original size ]
If you'd like to see the
images in High-Resolution JPG's then click the files below. Reminder,
these files are about 400 kb in size !
S3TC
So, why did the Detonator drivers jump from 3.x towards 5.08 ?
Multiple reasons, besides FSAA we'll find S3TC. About a month ago
NVidia became business relation with S3, patent holder of S3 Texture
compression. The new drivers have S3TC (S3 Texture compression)
included and enabled in them. When you enter Quake III you can
actually notice it. (look at the sky) Texture Compression helps
solving issues with memory bandwidth.
Last but not least, performance increase. The new drivers increase
performance in QuakeIII up-to 20-30% !
So, try out these drivers folks, they may still be in Beta stage but
the performance increase alone is worth to try them out.
We do not take responsibility for fooling around with the Registry !
Use this information at your own risk !
Since our posts yesterday on the
availability of Full Scene Anti-Aliasing with the new Detonator drivers
we've received quite a lot of suggestions and questions. Here's a snip
of them:
Could you please repost the screen shots of with/without FSAA, in a
lossless format, either lossless JPG or GIF. There is too much
degradation in the JPGs you have posted to get a good comparison.
Kudos on the discovery tho. I will try to run on a TNT2 and let you know
the results.
Did you click on the pictures to get the full-screen images ? Anyway,
I'll post the original pics later today in the Detonator 5.08 FSAA page
on this site.
Hello.let me start by saying,VERY NICE SITE...very helpfull info..thx
for taking the time to comprize all the usefull info..my problem is,i
loaded the new 5.08 nvidia driver on my geforce 256 DDR...i read where
you guys say to set the FSAA value to 1 to get better performance...i
went from getting 78 FPS on high quality ..everything set at max..to a
freaking CRAWL!!!!!!!!..it was so slow,i couldnt bare to watch it run
the test LOL..any idea why??
.
Nooo no... I did not say this. FSAA does not give you better
performance, instead it'll decrease performance (but boost image
quality). To clearify this, the new Detonator drivers (5.08) are 20/30%
faster in Quake III arena in default compared towards the older 3.x
drivers. If you turn on FSAA you will loose performance bigtime.
When i put on the 5.08 drivers, and started a quake 3 game, i get
this constant white flickering. i found out that if i turn on "high
quality sky" in the game, the flickering goes away.
Okay, good tip, it probably has something to do with S3TC compression.
TNT2 + FSAA doesn't work, Tried it as soon as I read the article.
There's no drop in framerate for the TNT2 and no AA,
it simply "ignores" the key.
Yes it was doublechecked.
I am not surprise to see this in the Geforce though, I
always thought the Quadro and Geforce chips were
the same with some hardware features disabled by
the drivers. Now they've enabled the FSAA.
I'm still waiting for their NV15. I want a BIG
jump next time I pick another card :)
Regards,
Eric Slight.
Hey Eric, that's rather odd. I've heard some reports from other websites
that TNT-2 in fact worked but gave some strange image flickering.
Is anyone out there who can enable FSAA with a TNT(2) ? Write me, so
that I can spread the word on this matter.
Keep e-mailing folks .. Knowledge is power !
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