Guide: How to get much better anti-aliasing in Rome 2 for no performance hit

[CanOmer]

As many of you may have noticed, Rome II's in-game "anti-aliasing" option is a simple on/off toggle switch that turns on what is called "FXAA", or Fast Approximation Anti Aliasing (or it could be "MLAA", Morphological Anti-Aliasing, but they're both almost identical). Anti-aliasing in general is meant to "smooth out" the "jaggedness" of textures. The benefits of FXAA over conventional/normal anti-aliasing is that it is pretty much zero performance hit. The drawback, however, is that it is really just a post-processing blur filter that makes the game look muddy and washed out.

So basically Rome II players are forced between making their game look jagged and awful*, or blurry and awful. I give you a third option: SweetFX. Download this (http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=528) and drop it in the folder "Total War Rome II" (which should be in your Steam > Steamapps > Common folder). After doing this, open "SweetFX_settings.txt" in Notepad and make sure "SMAA" is set to 1. Also fiddle with anything else that that you'd like but personally I only use it for SMAA. Then start the game and turn off the in-game anti aliasing in the options, and hit your Scroll Lock key (should be near your Print Screen and Pause Break keys) to toggle SMAA on and off. I recommend starting a battle first and zooming in on a group of soldiers for the best comparison.

SMAA, or Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing, is basically yet another post-processing anti-aliasing function, except it looks much better and contributes nearly zero blur.

A few people have probably already suggested this, but I because the game just released that the signal-to-noise ratio on this forum might have drowned them out, so I'm making my own thread.

* = It may be possible to force conventional multisample/supersample anti aliasing, but given that Rome II already pushes my system right up to the limit, and I'm on a fairly modern system (3770 i7, 8GB DDR3, 660Ti OC'd), I doubt many people are looking to lop their already low framerate straight in half.

It is perfect. It is not just good AA but sharpening the edges a bit and giving vibrance a bit. These are my most using Photoshop effects for screenshots.

There is a problem also, I can't access Steam in the game by shift-Tab and can't take screenshots. Is there anyone know to fix this?

[CanOmer]

It has many options. Try this :

   /*-----------------------------------------------------------.
  /                      Choose effects                         /
  '-----------------------------------------------------------*/

// Set to 1 for ON or 0 for OFF
#define USE_SMAA_ANTIALIASING 1 //[0 or 1] SMAA Anti-aliasing : Smoothens jagged lines using the SMAA technique.
#define USE_FXAA_ANTIALIASING 0 //[0 or 1] FXAA Anti-aliasing : Smoothens jagged lines using the FXAA technique
#define USE_CARTOON       	  0 //[0 or 1] Cartoon : "Toon"s the image.
#define USE_ADVANCED_CRT      0 //[0 or 1] Advanced CRT : Simulates an old CRT TV display. Set gaussian blur along with it to get a halation effect
#define USE_BLOOM             1 //[0 or 1] Bloom : Makes bright lights bleed their light into their surroundings (relatively high performance cost)
#define USE_HDR               1 //[0 or 1] HDR : Not actual HDR - It just tries to mimic an HDR look (relatively high performance cost)
#define USE_LUMASHARPEN       1 //[0 or 1] LumaSharpen : Also sharpens the antialiased edges which makes them less smooth - I'm working on fixing that.
#define USE_GAUSSIAN          0 //[0 or 1] Gaussian Blur : can be used to... blur, but also bloom/hazy/glowy look, also unsharp masking
#define USE_FILMGRAIN         0 //[0 or 1] Filmgrain effect
#define USE_TECHNICOLOR       0 //[0 or 1] TECHNICOLOR : Attempts to mimic the look of an old movie using the Technicolor three-strip color process (Techicolor Process 4)
#define USE_DPX               1 //[0 or 1] Cineon DPX : Should make the image look like it's been converted to DXP Cineon - basically it's another movie-like look similar to technicolor.
#define USE_MONOCHROME        0 //[0 or 1] Monochrome : Monochrome makes the colors disappear.
#define USE_LIFTGAMMAGAIN     1 //[0 or 1] Lift Gamma Gain : Adjust brightness and color of shadows, midtones and highlights (avoids clipping)
#define USE_TONEMAP           1 //[0 or 1] Tonemap : Adjust gamma, exposure, saturation, bleach and defog. (may cause clipping)
#define USE_VIBRANCE          1 //[0 or 1] Vibrance : Intelligently saturates (or desaturates if you use negative values) the pixels depending on their original saturation.
#define USE_CURVES            1 //[0 or 1] Curves : Contrast adjustments using S-curves.
#define USE_SEPIA             0 //[0 or 1] Sepia : Sepia tones the image.
#define USE_VIGNETTE          1 //[0 or 1] Vignette : Darkens the edges of the image to make it look more like it was shot with a camera lens. May cause banding artifacts.
#define USE_DITHER            1 //[0 or 1] Dither : Applies dithering to simulate more colors than your monitor can display. This lessens banding artifacts (mostly caused by Vignette)
#define USE_BORDER            0 //[0 or 1] Border : Makes the screenedge black as a workaround for the bright edge that forcing some AA modes sometimes causes.
#define USE_SPLITSCREEN       0 //[0 or 1] Splitscreen : Enables the before-and-after splitscreen comparison mode.

[CanOmer]

After some tweaking;

Before



After

[Hrobatos]

And performance remains same?

[babydoc]

Im allways using sweetFX in my games.
Look above in the settings.txt, the options that costs performance are in the description.

[A Barbarian]

No, you don't get much better anti-aliasing that way. FXAA/SMAA/MLAA are all pretty similar. You get a minor improvement at best. Just look at the trees in the background, they are completely disjointed. And in motion everything is flickering/shimmering because of the pixelation going on. In closeups the graphics are ok but on medium/far distance they look horrible even with any combination or setting of AA post processing filter. The solution would be to have proper MSAA (which is more costly of course) and be able to activate SSAA (which is even more costly). But regarding the performance costs, I would gladly reduce other settings if I could just get proper anti-aliasing which eliminates all the disjointed 3D models and all the flickering/shimmering.

[alQamar]

The antialiasing expert spoke

[A Barbarian]

Hehe, if you would say 'antialising fetishist' I wouldn't mind either Regarding the OP. Pointing people towards possibilities to customize their graphics is a good idea, I just think the the thread title is slightly misleading.

[PunitorMaximus]

it worked for me, thanks a lot