Hi!

Ati introduced a new form of antialiasing of transparent textures like trees and fences. It uses multisampling, so it causes a much smaller performance hit as opposed to the supersampling adaptive AA (IIRC Nvidia has it too).

You need Catalyst 6.10 beta for this to work. Also you have to edit the registry:

Go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video" (I have no idea why there is a gap in control). There you will probably find many entries. Look in their "0000" subkey for a string which is your current driver version (should be 6.10). You may find more than one (I have four).
Now create a string named "EATM" and give it a value of "1" in each "0000" key with the correct driver entry.

For me it overrides the adaptive AA setting. I read you change the number of samples along with the normal AA setting, but I didn´t try that.

The trees get an ugly dithering-pattern in the distance. You have to change the MIP bias to "0" in order to reduce that. Also the filtered textures are blurrier when you get close to them.

Cool is that this AA type reduces the ugly borders around the trees you usually get when you increase the MIP bias. Also you get a nice performance boost by doing that. And the resulting image is much smoother. The buildings in South City display correctly and there are no coloured lines at the edge of the screen. Both issues happen when you use adaptive AA.
:ghostie:

Additional note for nVidia users:
For Performance & Quality Settings > Advanced settings > Transparency antialiasing, always select "Multisampling" and NOT "Supersampling". Atleast in my driver version (ForceWare 91.47) the latter one causes ugly artifacts on buildings.

If you think the profile doesn't save, do the mods, press OK and open the settings again. Hey presto, it's saved!

Quote from SladiVadi :

Narf

What cards support that? Might be a valuable info before someone gets the beta driver and scraps his system when his cards doesn't support this new AA anyway...

Sladivadi,

Where did you find out this info? I'm downloading now to give it a shot, I've been wanted to drive around in LFS with anti-aliased alpha t's for awhile now. It does look a whole lot better, especially on the buildings in South City, but the performance has always taken a big dive with the current adaptive aa..

It´s on some forums (for example Beyond3d).

It should work with 9700 and up, maybe 9500 too, I don´t know.

Quote from Quint999 :

nope ! not on latest drivers, may not affect everyone, but a fair few repors of it not working at all

spend an fruitless hour try to get it to save for LFS , gave up and ended up using nhancer .. which is much nicer to use anyway

Well my drivers are less than a week old (tuesday) and they work like i said.

Quote from SladiVadi :

It´s on some forums (for example Beyond3d).

It should work with 9700 and up, maybe 9500 too, I don´t know.

Usually everything that works on 9700, works on 9500 too.

The glitches on the buildings still happen. It seems to affect only buildings at the edge of the screen.

Quote from Quint999 :

nope ! not on latest drivers, may not affect everyone, but a fair few repors of it not working at all

I noticed something different - the profile saves but it doesn't always apply itself when LFS gets started... I guess it's time to clean up the registry of all nvidia crap and re-install the drivers.

If the settings don't get applied, usually hitting Shift-F4 twice fixes the problem.

Quote from AndroidXP :

If the settings don't get applied, usually hitting Shift-F4 twice fixes the problem.

Doesn't appear to - I'll investigate further if this happens again when I clean up the registry. It's not an LFS-only problem for me, I notice the same thing happening with Wings3D and that uses OpenGL - so it's (I hope as simple as) something to do with the drivers screwing up.