Jagged - Zipper looking model lines

[Ron]

As I was "forced" to upgrade my computer when my old one died about a week ago, I am having trouble with my vehicle models below



Anyone know why I am getting such jagged lines? I am guessing its a setting in my graphics card? My old computer was junk compared to this one, but the 3d sure looked alot better. If it helps, the graphics card is a GEForce 9800GT and I'm running 1024x768 like I used to run in the other computer.

[pixel_legolas]

have you installed the nvidia driver? You should have a nvidia control center. There you can choose performance or quality. Quality will boost the overall quality of 3d apps. But you can also specify GC and add anti-alising, smoothing etc.

Right click on desktop and choose NVIDIA control center or whatever name. If it's not there then time to upgrade drivers from homepage

[Ron]

I have all the latest drivers installed, it just seems to be my graphics card. I have everything pegged at the high quality options  I even tried the latest Need for Speed game and it even has the same thing, just not as pronounced because they do not have so much of a mixture of chrome and body. The work around I found to help is to move the outlining meshes to the black color layer.

[pixel_legolas]

weird stuff. nothing with the resolution or something? *grasping for straws here*

Dunno, ask the nvidia support also, maybe they will turn it to a hax0r modded uber graphic-card with a unreleased driver...

[Ransom]

Looks like you dont have anti-aliasing (AA) turned on for your card.  Should be a setting somewhere in your graphics card options to enable it.  Thats one thing gamecore lacks is the ability to turn AA on/off from within the game - nearly every other pc game out there lets you do this.

[darkhelmet]

Did your OS change?  I had some weird problems with Vista until I turned off all MS default settings and put it into a more XP like mode, grasping at straws also.

[Ron]

I went from Vista to Windows 7. I am poking around more tonight, will post my results.

[Ron]

I getting a little further, but still not there yet... seems my graphics card does not want to run HDR and AA at the same time Seems this was trouble in alot of graphics cards with Oblivion until they had a patch of some sort, lots of google results on this I am trying to use to figure out a solution. Below is with HDR on and off with no other changes.

[gekido]

one thing to note - the Levels filter that you have applied in the screenshot is NOT the 64-bit proper hdr levels - it's the old-school 'beyond virtual' style hdr that we used to have.

Try the levels HDR filter instead.  don't really expect much difference though, but it's probably the one that you would want to be using anyways.

Basically the issue is that using Anti-Aliasing with Transparency in DirectX9 is pretty much a no-go without considerable 'hacks'. 

Here are a few threads on the gamedev forums sort of explains it (and has some links to the Nvidia site to try and clarify):

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=485113

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=547845&whichpage=1&#3529790

The patch for Oblivion to make AA work was actually the ATI driver developers putting in a flag to detect if Oblivion was running to override and enable the anti-aliasing.  Not exactly an option for us ;}

[Ron]

This seems to be related to any post processing... hdr, levels, blur. When I turn any of them on, AA no longer works. This is true in my game and also commercial games. Still amazes me that my dinosaur Radeon X1650 AGP card didn't have this problem and the Nvidia card that is supposed to be so much better has it.

Time to start moving forward again, going to continue developing without hdr and put it as a option that players can turn on and off in the game. I now have a new preference for video cards and its not Nvidia... grrrrrr lol

[gekido]

Has more to do with the different ways that modern shader-engines do things like post processing (specifically how they use off-screen render buffers) than anything else.  Older games didn't do HDR etc the same way, and as a result, didn't run into the same issues.

Adding proper handling of AA in GameCore is something that we've been aware of for a while, just having had time to dive in and rework the renderer yet.  It's very much something that we would like to provide a native solution for so that hacks etc aren't necessary.

Have you tried forcing AA on in your driver control panel? 

It's definitely easy enough to provide an option to allow users to turn things like post-processing on or off from in-game.

[Ron]

I tried everything in my power. I checked and I already have the latest drivers. I used every reasonable combo with the Nvidia Control panel. Any time I use any post processing, AA disappears. This is the same in my game, demos, running the editor, running my game in the editor and also running a compiled game.

This is not just isolated to GameCore, happens in other programs too, just not as pronounced probably because they know how to program and model better than me and they typically have newer vehicles that do not have as much chrome that contrasts against the car bodies.

Also, the way the last release candidate was setup, it does not seem to show up there in the version I compiled. Is that version still available that I can do further exploration or testing?

[Wrapscallion]

I've run both nvidia and ati cards......I've noticed one thing which keeps me running ati cards....better AA, HDR bloom support it seems.

This is my old comp, p4, 2.8ghz, 1mb ram, 80gb hd.....changed from an nvidia geforce 6500(i think it was that....) to an ati radeon 2400 ultra...and noticed a huge performance increase, especially in " screen tearing", and in AA and the bloom that i can do with Game Core.

[gekido]

Handling AA with full-screen post-effects like HDR / etc requires a custom solution that doesn't work with the standard drivers.

Basically the issue is that the drivers don't support AA in off-screen render buffers, which is what most engines use to do post-processing etc - we do have a solution in the works that will provide in-engine AA support, but I'll have to confirm with the programming team whether this will make it into the upcoming release or not.