How to force Anti-Aliasing?

[HaveFallen]

Evening,

My apologies if I may not be on the right area to ask.. I have tried the Nvidia Control Panel and Nvidia Inspector, but apparently some players have AA on through them. Am I doing something wrong or missing something? I would prefer not to use any injectors like SweetFX as the AA isn't true and I can tell.
.

[A Barbarian]

Some people supposedly have been able to force AA with Nvidia Inspector although on request they failed to provide any screenshots so I am not sure it's possible. On AMD I tried various stuff, CCC, RadeonPro, DX9/Shader3 to no avail. I stopped playing Rome 2 due to the horrible AA. I don't want to waste my time looking at all those disjointed trees and flickering/shimmering units.

[Totalheadache]

yeah i think you are right barbarian, I still havent tried the Vram fix so gonna try that...

might be harsh but atm the game is butt ugly...

[A Barbarian]

The funny thing is, with high-end GPUs, there would be easily enough idle GPU power even for something like 4xSSAA.

Because minimum framerates in battles are again completely CPU limited. Depending on shadow and unit detail settings, I have between 20fps and 30fps minimum. At the same time, my 2x7970s are utilized to about 40% only, lol (which is why I am using only one because I can't get better minimum framerates with 2). The unused 60% GPU power could be easily used for MSAA or SSAA. VRAM size could be a problem but I would gladly reduce texture resolution if I only could get proper AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.

[Baleur]

I don't understand how game devs can let their graphics artists sit there in their studio and suck up salary and time for months on end, when all their hard (and expensive) work won't even look good because they engine coders didn't bother accounting for proper anti-aliasing.

I've said it before (especially at the launch of Shogun 2 which had the EXACT same issue, no proper AA) and i'll say it again.
Anti-Aliasing is THE most important god darned graphical feature in computer graphics. Period.
I don't care if the devs have to give up fancy wet-skin shaders, deferred lighting or even the bloody sun in the sky.
NOTHING is more important than anti-aliasing in modern computer games, especially in a game with so many tiny details as in a strategy game.

How any AAA studio in 2013 still doesn't comprehend this is a complete bloody mystery to me.
I don't give a rats arse about higher res textures than Shogun 2.
I don't give a rats arse about deferred lighting.
I don't give a rats arse about kewl fire effects from javelins.
I care about anti-aliasing. Because without anti-aliasing every single penny that they spent on their texture artists and modellers and animators become utterly wasted, as we can't even bloody see the hard work anyway, it's all just a homogenous mass of flickering pixels. Might as well play Minecraft. No i'm not exagerrating.

And I can not believe that we spent 60 dollars on a sequel to Shogun 2, a game which finally has proper working anti-aliasing in playable framerates.
And they couldn't even be bothered to build UPON the existing improvements to Shogun 2. They just completely took a dump on that and went back to Shogun 2 launch day.

[HaveFallen]

etc.

Completely agree. I may be spoiled, but I can not play the game without the AA...

And I ask, because Lucifer over at the Mod forums with his GEM mod seems to have it working, with pictures.. And he says it's been done all in the Nvidia Control Panel with Override settings! How does he do this?! There's also different types of posts with people who have AA working and those who don't like us. What?!
.

[A Barbarian]

And I ask, because Lucifer over at the Mod forums with his GEM mod seems to have it working, with pictures

They don't have proper MSAA as far as I can tell from those closeups and scaled down images.

[Baleur]

That's not spoiled.
Anti-aliasing is the most barebones basic thing since friggin Half-Life 1.
I remember the first time i ever used AA in a game with my spanking new graphics card, the first game i tested it in was Half-Life 1.

Idk if those guys really have proper AA or not. Some dude posted nicely AA'd screenshots, but they were in like 1334x799 resolution. Most likely just downscaled screens.
I still haven't seen a single proper full res (1680x1050 or higher) screenshot with anti-aliasing except for shader SMAA which does jack (FXAA has the same result, with four times less preformance impact).

[Ataegina]

this smells like shogun 2 all over again...... waiting 1 to 2 months to having AA ingame but AA does make alot of different on everything, its sad seeing units and trees and grass and then because no AA we've all of those ugly edges

[Totalheadache]

ok sweetfx and fxaa game is looking ok...

[A Barbarian]

In stills it's ok. When everything is in motion there is way too much flimmering/flickering going on for my taste.

[Baleur]

I agree it looks okay with FXAA, but Shogun 2, NTW and ETW still looks better thanks to smooth edges.

[A Barbarian]

I had a look into the binary files (Rome2.dll) and all the MSAA references which did exist in Shogun 2 (shogun2.dll) have been removed. It seems that MSAA has been wiped from the current release and with the focus of CA on fixing bugs and improving speed we might not see any MSAA for a long time if ever.

This also makes the claim from some people that they only needed to edit the preferences script file to change gfx_aa 1; # to 2 or higher to get MSAA (as in Shogun 2) look like a myth. I tried that as well and never got it working which was one of the reasons I looked at the binary files.

[shane32ie]

SMAA with sweetfx or downsampling is only way for AA in this game for time being.

[HaveFallen]

I had a look into the binary files (Rome2.dll) and all the MSAA references which did exist in Shogun 2 (shogun2.dll) have been removed. It seems that MSAA has been wiped from the current release and with the focus of CA on fixing bugs and improving speed we might not see any MSAA for a long time if ever.

This also makes the claim from some people that they only needed to edit the preferences script file to change gfx_aa 1; # to 2 or higher to get MSAA (as in Shogun 2) look like a myth. I tried that as well and never got it working which was one of the reasons I looked at the binary files.

For shame....

SMAA with sweetfx or downsampling is only way for AA in this game for time being.

Sadly, it is not the same..
.

[Wintermist]

Using the Nvidia control panel you can enable FXAA in there, which does a better job of anti-aliasing than the in-game version, and I also like it much better than SMAA.