Project Reality Forums

I know this isn't directly related to PR but I think some people here who play PR might benefit from it.

I'm constantly tweaking my settings and video card to get better results in game . I always play with the ingame filter setting on high, which is supposed to be equvilant to 4xaf. I left this on high, as there is no off option, and went into nvidia control panel and turned application controlled to off for anistropic filtering and manually set it to 8xaf. I went back into PR with Fraps running and low and behold I got similar FPS but had 8xaf now. It appeared at least like I was getting 8xaf image quality. I need some more testing to be sure of all of this on some different maps.

Anyway this may help some of you out if in fact that BF2 doesn't handle the AF as well as the control panel. Anyone else noticed this?

Screenshots please.

EDIT: Holy sheet, either I'm imagining stuff or the image is muc clearer! THX

I am excited to try this out when I get home. My understanding was that application controlled AF was ideal for BF2 but I would gladly be mistaken if it means an improvement...nice find!

Do you know if need to leave the NVIDIA control panel running while playing or should you shut it down like other unecessary processes before launching BF2/PR?

In the Nvidia Control Pannel I click on the Program Setting Tab, find Battlefield 2 as one of the games, and confiqure it there instead of having 8x AF for ALL games i play. I can also set 8xsAA there

loyalguard, when you press Apply, you can close the window.

Anyone know if this is the same on ATI?

i have just cranked my ATI catalyst AF and AA settings to the max (16 x AF, 6 x AA), just about to boot up bf2, will let you know how it goes!.... watch this space...

I have much better results using the Nvidia CP for my Anti-Aliasing settings too.

When i use BF2 to control my AA i can only run at 1024x768 with most things on medium and dynamic lighting off and i still get gfx lag.

When i use the Nvidia CP for AA ( AA set to OFF in BF2 ) i can run at 4x at 1280x1024 with a little lag in some high action places and most things on med/high.

I run:
P4 2.6
1gig of ddr 400
6800GS 256mb AGP

Seems letting the nvidia CP do the work gets MUCH better results..., well does for me anyhow lol.

although now i dont have time for extensive testing, (that WILL come later) on fist impressions the ATI catalyst seems to have had a negative effect, much less smoothing and a lot more artifacts, i will report back when i have had a chance to test better, quick question, when you bring up the FPS, what do the 2 numbere (seperated by / ) actually mean?

just for the record, my system is FAR from high end, im currently running

AMD Athlon XP 2400+ @ 1.99Ghz
1.75 gig of DDR ram
Radeon X800 GTO with 256 DDR3 ram

runs the game excelently on med-high with 6x AA

I've never been able to get BF2 to run with CP set AA. Always had to use in game/app controlled. Not sure about AF though.

The AF thing is really good when on the max, especially with larger view distances where the terrain looked like shite, no more.

Turned on 16AA+16AF on 8800 GTS. Sorry no screens yet, but it looked to me much better. Super+Multi Sampling too.

You guys running this through nHancer? I stopped using the n CP as I found it to be somewhat useless when it came to tweaking graphics so I changed to nHancer a few years back because it was much more user friendly.
Did my little test and found:
The game 4xAA looks better than the CP Multi Sampling 4xAA.
The game High texture filter looks slightly worse than CP 8xAF (noticeable on long roads and such)
So for me the best is 4xAA in game and 8xAF in CP.

Garack wrote:Turned on 16AA+16AF on 8800 GTS. Sorry no screens yet, but it looked to me much better. Super+Multi Sampling too.

I tried these settings with my 6800 GT and it just looked fantastic. Only problem was it was running sloooow .

But with 8AA/8AF it runs fine

how do I get on to this bit of the Nvidia control panel?

I don't see any program settings...

EDIT: found it... and WOW

When I enabled AF via ATi CP it removed my in game AA. Enabling AA and AF in CP didn't rectify the problem.

Wish I could play with these settings

Here's couple screen shots (Game all max and Nvidia 16xAA, 16xAF)

The Screens are without Supersampling, turning on reduces Frames on grass maps extremly, but grass and Alpha-Textures looking better.

Garack wrote:The Screens are without Supersampling, turning on reduces Frames on grass maps extremly, but grass and Alpha-Textures looking better.

Yeah. Known as Adaptive AA on ATi. It's great for some games and urban maps but PR's big grassy maps bring even the best of systems to it's knees. No wonder considering how much stuff it has to AA.

Well I did some testing last night to figure out what the best setup is. My testing was fairly informal though I tried my best to keep things constant while I changed settings. System Specs:

AMD64 3700+ @ 2.9GHz
2x1 GB ram
7800GTX 256mb @ 500/1300 driver tweaked 91.47
1680x1050 resolution
BF2 settings are a mix of High/med with 2xAA

Basically I had the in-game texture filtering set to High (which is supposed to be equal to 4xAF) and I would tab out of the game and change the Nvidia CP settings and then tab back in to see what happens. I would pick a spot on a map where I was getting less then max FPS (BF2 max is 100fps) and aim at a very specific spot. I would then try this with various settings to see the FPS. The whole time I had Fraps running to display the FPS. If for some reason someone was in the area or there was a lot of change happening in the area I did not use the numbers as the FPS would be to inconsistant.

Here is what I found:

Nvidia CP 4xAF_______BF2 High texture filtering
65--------------------73
66--------------------72
58--------------------62

So as you can see there was an advantage in each instance in using the BF2 settings v.s. the control panel settings. This really surprised me. While playing and watching the FPS you would see a constant difference of 4-8fps difference all the time. Certain areas it made no difference i.e. looking at a wall. I'm not sure if anyone can confirm that the BF2 settings are in fact 4xAF but I was hard pressed to notice any difference in image quality between the two.

Just for more info I did the same testing but used 8xAF in the Nvidia CP vs. the in-game BF2 settings on high texture filtering. Nothing else was changed and I used the same method to test.


Nvidia 8xAF_________BF2 High texture filtering
78-------------------85
76-------------------85
35-------------------45
33-------------------41

As you can see, and as expected, the 8xAF setting runs slower. The last two readings are low becuase I went into a room and let off two smoke nades, this really drops the FPS. However what I was surprised to see was that the fps hit was less then 10fps in every situation. The game ran just as smooth because anything below 30fps would be noticeable lag but 30fps and above is smooth. But the image quality difference in game from running 8xAF vs. 4xAF is huge!. The textures are sharper, extend farther and the game no longer looks like everything is covered in mud The performance penalty is very acceptable, much less then I expected.

Running 8xAF the game looks great, which is no surprise as any game will usually look better at 8xAF vs. 4xAF. However people with decent systems who are not aware of this setting are missing out because the image quality comes at a very modest cost to FPS. Sorry to say that if you have a lower end or mid range system I haven't found a performance boost for you with the 4xAF vs. BF2 settings and you won't be able to benefit from the 8xAF

Well I hope that this made sence

Thanks for sharing, going to give it a try.