Anti-Aliasing? In my Halo? It's more likely than you think! (ATI 5&6+ series only)

[itszutak]

PREMPTIVE WARNING-- THIS WILL ONLY WORK IF YOU HAVE AN ATI(AMD) 5-SERIES OR ABOVE. SORRY :(

So the newest drivers for the ATI 6 series add something called Morphological Anti-Aliasing, which claims to give effectively "free" 4xMSAA. Pretty neat in itself-- but an added bonus is that it works on ALL 3D GAMES. and that includes Halo, which so far has eluded every attempt (that I am aware of) to be anti-aliased.

See for yourself (click for full view):
http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/2575/example1u.gif


FOR ATI 5 SERIES:
http://support.amd.com/la/kbarticles/Pages/GPU87AMDCat1010eHotfix.aspx

note: This driver is for windows 7.
Just throwing that out there, in case anyone wants to try it out.

Oh, also, since it's post-processing of sorts, you can only take screenshots of it by having it in windowed mode and alt-tabbing away from it to take the shot.

[Dwood]

Nice!

[AAA]

That's as close as it gets for Halo.

[Amit]

I'm trying this as soon as I get home.

[king_nothing_]

Wow, this sounds great. Thanks for posting it.

That download link though, despite saying it's 10.10a, is actually for 10.10b. The inf file that those instructions tell you to modify (C7106976.inf) is not in the 10.10b hotfix. The closest thing is C7107195.inf.

I just found this link which has pre-modded 10.10a and 10.10c downloads: http://my.opera.com/rejzor/blog/amd-with-new-morphological-anti-aliasing. I'm going to try it out.

I have a 5850, btw.

[king_nothing_]

I got it to work. It seems to work pretty well. There were a few spots where I still saw some jaggies, but there weren't many at all. It doesn't work at all when using a scope. Despite the claim that it has little to no performance hit, it decreased my FPS by around 50%. My FPS was still well over 100 though, so I guess it's not a big deal (in Halo, at least).

[Dwood]

with amd 5 and up series a 50% hit on Halo is nothing when we're getting 600 fps in the first place loal.

[t3h m00kz]

Wow, that's pretty legit

Too bad I'm Nvidia

[Higuy]

Someone should show off some other pics with it applied.

[Lateksi]

Yeah, I'd like to see some more pics too. :)

[InnerGoat]

Ugh they could have done this like 7 years ago :(

[itszutak]

I think the mac version of halo supports 2xAA or something like that. Anyhow, thanks king_ for the informative testing, gonna add that to the OP

Edit: Screenshots for comparison will be added to the OP if provided, I don't really like the comparison .gif that's up there right now and don't have a 5/6 series to take shots with myself

[EagerYoungSpaceCadet]

Wow I certainly got lucky for getting a HD 5670 yesterday :)

E: can't seem to make it work, is it win7 only?

[itszutak]

The drivers are for windows 7, so I'd guess that it's windows 7 only.

[king_nothing_]

http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/2575/example1u.gif

[Amit]

Looks amazing.

[Cortexian]

I thought I remembered seeing a fix like this for Nvidia stuff a long time ago. Idk.

[Warsaw]

The only nVidia fix I am aware of is the one that fixed the camouflage.

[Lateksi]

Shit this is cool!

[Skarma]

I hope FireScythe does some post-processing AA in the future for Halo. That or supersampling!

[FireScythe]

Well MLAA seems to be a colour only post process, so while I wouldn't be doing it myself I don't see why someone couldn't create a shader from whatever information is eventually released for use in open sauce. A quick search on gamedev.net (http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=580517) has (non MLAA) AA postprocess shaders that someone could use.

[itszutak]

The problem with most of those filters is that the result isn't quite as convincing as MLAA; in my experience most fake AA methods simply blur the whole screen, or make edges look crappy and fuzzy. This, however, is pretty damn close to 4xAA. The only difference that I've noticed is that text gets caught up in the AA method, and looks a bit wonky in source games.

[itszutak]

Little bit of a bump: There is now an official MLAA driver for the 5 series. Link is in the OP and also right here: http://support.amd.com/la/kbarticles/Pages/GPU87AMDCat1010eHotfix.aspx

[king_nothing_]

The download link on that page doesn't work.

[Pyong Kawaguchi]

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5LOF7SIF
Heres a new link to the drivers for all to enjoy!~

[Siliconmaster]

Sad this isn't for Nvidia :(

[Warsaw]

To be fair, Halo was built to favour ATi cards. There are very few games built to favour ATi, but there are a ton that favour the competition. *coughMetro2033cough*

[famer]

To be fair, Halo was built to favour ATi cards. There are very few games built to favour ATi, but there are a ton that favour the competition. *coughMetro2033cough*

eeeeee .... no http://www.chw.net/foro/images/smilies/zippy1.gif

Mmxrx3IQ-iQ

halo 3 / odst and reach , was built to favour ATi cards :gonk:

[Cortexian]

famer that commercial was back when the game was for Macintosh... It then got moved to Xbox (ATI) and PC (still favored ATI).

[Limited]

eeeeee .... no http://www.chw.net/foro/images/smilies/zippy1.gif

Mmxrx3IQ-iQ

halo 3 / odst and reach , was built to favour ATi cards :gonk:
I know its way old video, but when ever I see it I always think its a joke parody. The dudes voice just sounds so sarcastic to me.

[TVTyrant]

No wonder all the textures and models are weird... Kinda like the cover of the game eh?

[Warsaw]

famer that commercial was back when the game was for Macintosh... It then got moved to Xbox (ATI) and PC (still favored ATI).

Original Xbox ran a heavily modified nVidia GeForce 2 chip, but the PC version was built to favour ATi since ATi at the time was more advanced than nVidia with its Radeon 9800 series and Shader Model 2.0 support.

[Cortexian]

Oh right, the 360 is ATI. My bad.

[Amit]

Oh right, the 360 is ATI. My bad.

Yeah lol, I was wondering. But I read somewhere years ago that the nVidia chip used in the XBOX was a heavily modified GeForce 3 chip, not GeForce 2.

[=sw=warlord]

But I read somewhere years ago that the nVidia chip used in the XBOX was a heavily modified GeForce 3 chip, not GeForce 2.

Original Xbox ran on the NV2a chip. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Technical_specifications)
A modified Nvidia 2.

[Warsaw]

It's actually rather hilarious, considering that one needed at least a Radeon 9000 or GeForce 5200 LE to get similar levels of detail on PC, and all a GeForce 2 could do was render grey blobs.

Also, one of the reasons the Xbox 360 was rushed out the door is because nVidia had since stopped manufacture of GPUs for the original box due to disagreements in royalties (thus ending the original's production run, sad day). That's also why the 360 runs ATi and not nVidia.

[Cortexian]

Original was also way more fun to mod.

[InnerGoat]

Original Xbox ran on the NV2a chip. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Technical_specifications)
A modified Nvidia 2.

What is an Nvidia 2? If you mean Geforce 2 then no. :)

Give that link you posted a click. Feature wise its closest to the GF4 Ti (it is in vertex/shader layout as well)

[Cortexian]

I have/had many GeForce 4 Ti's, and I can attest that the performance was similar.

[Warsaw]

What is an Nvidia 2? If you mean Geforce 2 then no. :)

Give that link you posted a click. Feature wise its closest to the GF4 Ti (it is in vertex/shader layout as well)

But it predated it. It was a GeForce 2 modified. You might say that their experience with the XBOX is helped along the release of the GeForce 4 series, which was based on the GF2 chip. Note, there was no GF3.

[InnerGoat]

Of course it predated it nobody was denying that. I guess you can say it is a modified GF2 because the experience gained from that went into NV2A and 20. I'd have to go google it up some time, it's been like 9 years :-3

Also yes there was a GF3. Where do you come up with this stuff? I have one.

[Warsaw]

I was just thinking back. I remember there being a GF2 and then my recollection jumps to the MX4 series. Upon using Wiki, though, I do see that there is a GF3. My bad.

[EagerYoungSpaceCadet]

*bump*


Works on drivers 10.12, the tweaks are here (http://www.filefront.com/17641970/AMD-Catalyst-Von-Tweaks-v1.0.7z/).

Looks good better then without AA, but forget about all the BS you heard about it being less resource intense then MSAA.
Halo lost 30% FPS. Halo 2 actually runs smoother with 4x MSAA.
I noticed a 4 FPS (hohoho) increase in DiRT 2 with MLAA compared to 4x MSAA, but with the added effect of everything looking like shit compared to MSAA.

My dreams of "free" AA are gone :smith:

[Shock120]

*bump*


Works on drivers 10.12, the tweaks are here (http://www.filefront.com/17641970/AMD-Catalyst-Von-Tweaks-v1.0.7z/).

Looks good better then without AA, but forget about all the BS you heard about it being less resource intense then MSAA.
Halo lost 30% FPS. Halo 2 actually runs smoother with 4x MSAA.
I noticed a 4 FPS (hohoho) increase in DiRT 2 with MLAA compared to 4x MSAA, but with the added effect of everything looking like shit compared to MSAA.

My dreams of "free" AA are gone :smith:Thx. :D

Also, incase everyone forgot, sawnose posted about enabling anisotropic filtering. :D

An email conversation the other day reminded me of a config.txt setting for Halo 1 PC that may interest people - the game supports anisotropic filtering, (better than trilinear, which you're probably using now), but for performance reasons, we didn't enable it on cards we hadn't specifically tested. Which now includes any card you'd be using today.

It's easy to enable it, but be warned this is only an unsupported tip, and I can't guarantee how well it will work (that's the whole reason we left it off for unknown cards)

go to your game directory and open config.txt
find the vendor string for your video card's PnP device ID (I'll let others reply with expanded help for people who don't know what this means)

Nvidia users will scroll to here:
///////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// NVIDIA
//
//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Vendor = 0x10b4 "nVidia"
Vendor = 0x12d2 "nVidia"
Vendor = 0x10de "nVidia"

If you have a modern card, your device ID isn't listed below. So scroll down to the Unknown section:

Unknown = "Unknown"
//UseAnisotropicFilter

remove the "//" from this line to enable aniso. If you don't like it, put them back to comment out the line again.

Enjoy!

(p.s. - no, this isn't what I meant in the podcast. I'm not planning any game changes or updates. There are no concrete plans for the CD key, but it's your way to show us that you're a Halo 1 player, which we might want to know in the future.) (http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=35242876)

[Amit]

Does it look any better than Trilinear? Actually, it does look loads better :D

http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/5874/20185070.gif

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/1768/64011969.gif

There's a good bit of noise from converting the images to GIF format, but the impact is quite clear.

[Higuy]

Do you have to have windows 7 to use this? (Yes im a lazy bastard and still use windows vista, )

[Cortexian]

Why would you use Vista at all? It's horrible. It was like a stepping stone to 7 and that's all, you really should upgrade...

[EagerYoungSpaceCadet]

Do you have to have windows 7 to use this? (Yes im a lazy bastard and still use windows vista, )To use what? Anti Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering? Both work on vista.

[Limited]

Why would you use Vista at all? It's horrible. It was like a stepping stone to 7 and that's all, you really should upgrade...
Perhaps he purchased a laptop that came preinstalled with Vista before W7 was out and its too much of a pain to update for him? No you won't need W7 for AA and AF. They are rendering techniques, dependent on graphics card, not software.

[=sw=warlord]

Why would you use Vista at all? It's horrible. It was like a stepping stone to 7 and that's all, you really should upgrade...
Some people prefer Vista as opposed to W7.

[Limited]

Some people prefer Vista as opposed to W7.
The vast majority of sane people prefer W7...

[=sw=warlord]

The vast majority of sane people prefer W7...

The I must be insane.
I cannot stand how the task bar has been butchered.
I've tried various releases of W7 including retail and I still didn't like it.

[Amit]

The I must be insane.
I cannot stand how the task bar has been butchered.
I've tried various releases of W7 including retail and I still didn't like it.

Yeah lol, maybe you are. The vast majority of users that use W7 love the taskbar. Why? Because it's simple and effective. I no longer need more than 3 Icons on my desktop or a gay dock for the side of the screen.

[Rook]

The I must be insane.
I cannot stand how the task bar has been butchered.
I've tried various releases of W7 including retail and I still didn't like it.

You can make the taskbar look like the old one.

http://bacon.modacity.net/img/images/jeez.jpg
http://bacon.modacity.net/img/images/fdsf.jpg

First one would look just like old windows style if those programs weren't pinned to taskbar.

The superior way to have your taskbar however...

http://bacon.modacity.net/img/images/tbar.jpg

[=sw=warlord]

Yeah lol, maybe you are. The vast majority of users that use W7 love the taskbar. Why? Because it's simple and effective. I no longer need more than 3 Icons on my desktop or a gay dock for the side of the screen.
All I see in the W7 task bar is clutter.
I rarely ever see my desktop and when I do, I have no icons of which you speak off as I use rocket dock.
As for the whole W7 task bar being superior thing, considering it's what you see most when you're using applications the more bars on the bar the more cluttered it looks.
@Rook, I didn't know they'd added the ability to revert to the old style, but for now I think I'll stick with Vista, I've got this copy running smoother than I ever had XP running.

[Cortexian]

The 7 taskbar is the Vista taskbar with dock-tech integrated. I think you're doing it wrong. And it's had the ability to look like the old taskbar since pre-beta leaked builds...

[Higuy]

Perhaps he purchased a laptop that came preinstalled with Vista before W7 was out and its too much of a pain to update for him? No you won't need W7 for AA and AF. They are rendering techniques, dependent on graphics card, not software.

No, I just have to many things I need to save on my hard drive and not enough space anywhere to back it up. Otherwise, I probably would upgrade. My mom also has Windows 7 on her laptop and I really hate how some of the features work imo.

[=sw=warlord]

The 7 taskbar is the Vista taskbar with dock-tech integrated. I think you're doing it wrong.
Not really.
I prefer to have separate bars, one dedicated to current running tasks, one for applications to be booted from.
I find the whole W7 docking scheme completely obnoxious and cluttered, I don't want every single thing condensed and then have to hover over the tasks to switch windows.
If I wanted to switch quickly I would just alt+tab.

[Dwood]

Not really.
I prefer to have separate bars, one dedicated to current running tasks, one for applications to be booted from.
I find the whole W7 docking scheme completely obnoxious and cluttered, I don't want every single thing condensed and then have to hover over the tasks to switch windows.
If I wanted to switch quickly I would just alt+tab.

You can set it up so that it's a separate item per window just like Vista/XP fyi.

[Higuy]

Hey guys, sorry about the bump.

But how exactly should this be set up in the Catalyst Control center to work for Halo?

[Amit]

CCC2 has been released but I haven't tried this on my 5750 yet. Would the steps be the same?

Look for Morphological Anti-Aliasing in the 3D settings somewhere. It's supposed to give you 4x MSAA in all 3d applications.

[EagerYoungSpaceCadet]

It's in Gaming Settings or sth, I'm on my laptop and it has NVidia.
Anyways, in the 3D Application Settings (or something like that), under the Antialiasing part, you have a checkbox on the top right side of the antialiasing samples slider which says Morphological filtering, check that and it works in every 3D app.

Note it might antialias the whole picture text and all if playing certain flash games etc.

[Amit]

Lumoria + 4x MSAA = MAZING SHOTS

[EagerYoungSpaceCadet]

Even more so if you use Firescythe's postprocessing :pcgaming:

[Higuy]

I dont see it anywhere, keep looking for Morphological Anti-Aliasing. Do I like have to have Windows 7 for this all to work?

Does this not work on the 5 series cards? If so = :saddowns:

e: Found some moddified drivers for the 5 series cards with Morphological Anti-Aliasing, so I'm going to try those out!

[EagerYoungSpaceCadet]

Why would you want to use modified drivers when the latest drivers have the feature and it's officially supported for both 5 and 6 series, on any OS?

[king_nothing_]

You shouldn't need to modify anything anymore.


http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/3145/morphoaa.jpg

[Higuy]

I thought I downloaded the latest drivers... I'll re-look :P

[Higuy]

Alright I got it to work but now my 2nd monitor is going crazy, and like seems to be updating with a line going up it whenever I do type, scroll, etc. 1st monitor dosent... Any help?

[Vicky]

Sounds like the old days when monitors did that by default.. smacking it sometimes helped :)

What kind of monitor is it?

[Higuy]

A Samsung 22", both of them. LCD, hd 1080p.

[Vicky]

Check Hertz, overscan, for my lcd-tv (hdmi) i had to set the overscan to none to get a screen-filling-full-HD picture..

[Sean Aero]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to record the Post-Processed AA enhanced video with the CCC settings mentioned in the first post? Fraps doesn't seem to work.

[Kornman00]

hmmmm...

Oh,
http://www.digitalsmicroscope.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Video-Camera-2.jpg

[Amit]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to record the Post-Processed AA enhanced video with the CCC settings mentioned in the first post? Fraps doesn't seem to work.

Ifafudafi mentioned in his particles thread at Halomods that there's an anti-aliasing function being built into the next version of OS. Whenever we ask about cool shit like that, we get posts like the one above mine. So depressing :(

[Sean Aero]

Ifafudafi mentioned in his particles thread at Halomods that there's an anti-aliasing function being built into the next version of OS. Whenever we ask about cool shit like that, we get posts like the one above mine. So depressing :(

I see but the solution I'm looking for is one where I don't have to wait for an x-amount of years on a release before I can start using it.
I'm more thinking in a time frame of 24-hours. It was more a question, if someone else was able to record a video clip of Halo in full screen with the ATI AA settings and if so what they used to make it happen.
Kornman, does post a fair solution but its a bit out of my price range.
Although I believe he mentioned something about buying one as a gift for me around Christmas if OS wasn't released by then.

[Kornman00]

OS's release is tied to CMT's. Unless they encounter a major set back.

[Higuy]

OS's release is tied to CMT's. Unless they encounter a major set back.
...Great.

[Choking Victim]

...Great.
The source (http://code.google.com/p/open-sauce/) has been available to the public throughout the development process, if you're that eager for it, compile it yourself.

As for the postprocessing AA CMT has been using with OS, I personally don't notice much of a difference while using it. You still see jagged edges, they're just softer. The effect isn't as recognizable as the one shown in this thread. (Maybe it's my settings though?)

[Amit]

The source (http://code.google.com/p/open-sauce/) has been available to the public throughout the development process, if you're that eager for it, compile it yourself.

As for the postprocessing AA CMT has been using with OS, I personally don't notice much of a difference while using it. You still see jagged edges, they're just softer. The effect isn't as recognizable as the one shown in this thread. (Maybe it's my settings though?)

I noticed the same thing in some of those pictures Ifafudafi posted in his thread at Halomods. Some look sort of smooth, others, not so much. It was definitely respectable, though, now that I compare the two methods, nothing like the ATi AA. I'll try to get some time and test it out myself on my desktop to see if I can record videos. Camtasia Studio could work, couldn't it?

And CMT's SPv3 is supposed to be released some time in the first half of next year, right?

[itszutak]

oh hey, someone bumped this. Haven't really been following halo CE (or OS) recently, but if someone PMs me a way to get this OS AA thing working, I'll add it (and anything else needed) to the OP

That's assuming it's out and such, not really sure what OS is ._.

[DarkHalo003]

This is truly something cool. Though it messes up Firefox (because it's a 3d Application Setting and not just a video-game application setting), it's easy to turn on and off. Glad ATI still does small things to support their customers!

[Higuy]

And CMT's SPv3 is supposed to be released some time in the first half of next year, right?

And how many times has CMT actually released when they said they would (spv2) lol??

[Sean Aero]

You can use RadeonPro to have ATI only affect certain applications (Halo) while others are unaffected.

EDIT: Would still love something to record the AA, waiting until next year is not an option.

[Amit]

Tell us all the programs you have tried to record with. That way we can better suggest something to record with. I suggested Camtasia Studio. I know that works in games since I did it for AOE3.

[Sean Aero]

Camtasia Studio, overall not a bad suggestion! So thanks Amit.
It does indeed do the job of recording the MLAA effect and totally seems to not affect the FPS in game which is a big plus.
Unfortunate the output in FPS no matter how I set it the Camtasia Recorder Settings does not match the smoothness of Fraps.
It feels like it skips a frame here and there which is a shame.
Also the method Camtasia Studio uses to trans-code the video into an actual workable format (.avi) is time consuming.
A total of 1 hour after the recording has ended is needed to produce the .avi file of 23 minutes in length and 52.3GB in size on a regular HDD.
SSD would probably speed this process up but I don't have that much free space on my SSD.
Another half hour would be needed to trans-code this with for example Sony Vegas to a 8Mb/s video to create a 1.5GB file in order to upload it to YouTube.
I'll upload the current 23 minute footage I have on Monday when I'm at uni since I kinda capped my upload limit at home for this month (50GB), so you can see the result for yourself.

So two major downsides:
- FPS drops in output
- Time consuming on Trans-coding

I'll try a few other apps and see if I can get better results.

Speaking of this OS AA, anyone have some comparing images? With and without AA?

[{XG}Gijs007]

Give msi afterburner a try, Its free and has excellent recording options.
I think it records mlaa as well, but it enables v-synch...

[Kornman00]

Try Microsoft Expression Encoder. I like it over CS.

[Sean Aero]

Give msi afterburner a try, Its free and has excellent recording options.
I think it records mlaa as well, but it enables v-synch...
Doesn't do MLAA, doesn't force v-sync, but output looks Crystal clear and Very Sexy :allears:
File size is a bit bigger too, but I guess that's also due to 40FPS capture, a video length of 14:24 minutes is around 38.9GB. (Will upload)
Had to download the beta in order to capture with sound.

Try Microsoft Expression Encoder. I like it over CS.
The output video stutters a lot (when in Halo), could be because of the 30.000 kbit setting, perhaps higher is required for 1080p without stutter.
Also I believe this didn't capture the MLAA.
Screen capture wise this one is very nice and clear for desktops/tutorials and such. Downside is the trans-coding but I guess for any YouTube tutorial under 10 minutes its pretty cool.

[Sean Aero]

The output video stutters a lot (when in Halo), could be because of the 30.000 kbit setting, perhaps higher is required for 1080p without stutter.
Also I believe this didn't capture the MLAA.
Screen capture wise this one is very nice and clear for desktops/tutorials and such. Downside is the trans-coding but I guess for any YouTube tutorial under 10 minutes its pretty cool.

Higher kbit settings do not resolve this problem, making Microsoft Expression Encoder not ideal for recording in full screen.

I've posted 2 videos in 1080p of a Camtasia Studio and a MSI afterburner recording in the following topic.
http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?20681-Higher-Resolution-in-Halo&p=599083#post599083
Camtasia Studio seems to be the only one with MLAA recording capabilities at this point, but has too many quality disadvantages compared to other recorders.