NOTICE: This takes advantage of a tweak on the NVIDIA control panel. Perhaps there's a way to do it for AMD/ATI cards but I'm not aware of one. Sorry! After many weeks of watching Uber's PA Livestreams and various gameplay videos, I finally decided to cough up the dough and buy into the Alpha build. I'm particularly interested to see how the game will graphically progress as we head towards release. Currently, the game doesn't natively support anti-aliasing. This makes it look a little rough in spots and gives the graphics a very sharp look. The goal of this tweak is to soften up the edges and make the game look more like the Kickstarter trailer. Follow these steps: -Go down to your taskbar and find the NVIDIA control panel logo. Right click it and bring up the control panel. -On the control panel go to the "Manage 3D Settings" subsection and select the program settings tab. -Click the "Add" button and navigate to the directory where PA.exe is located. -On the list of options, set Antialiasing - FXAA to on. FXAA is a sort of hipster pseudo-antialiasing technique that lightly blurs edges of objects. What's nice is performance impact is small, you can combine FXAA with conventional AA techniques, AND it gives the rendered graphics a softer texture which is fantastic for PA's art style. What's not nice is I'm pretty sure the tech is proprietary, so we probably wont see something like this in the final game. I also tried applying some Multi-Sampling (Normal) AA from the control panel, but it doesn't seem to have any effect at this point. Here's some comparison screenshots. They don't really do it justice, though. The effect is subtle, but it's a really nice touch when you're in-game. FXAA OFF FXAA ON FXAA OFF FXAA ON FXAA OFF FXAA ON Try it out!
Also, (this is something I just noticed) FXAA softens up the shadows. Look at the commander's shadow in the first picture. The aliasing on the commander is also present on its shadow. With FXAA applied, the shadow becomes really smooth. Weird.
Shadows normally suffer from aliasing just like 3d objects. FXAA will soften all "jaggies" on the entire screen. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_approximate_anti-aliasing
Interesting. I guess I never really noticed aliasing on in-game shadows (until PA). For most games, the low shadow resolution will stick out more than the aliasing. Haha.
Is that with the effect applied, or just in general? I'm really curious to see what the performance impact is on different systems.
Considering that FXAA is now officially implemented for everyone, it's kind of a silly bump, since you're only bumping the thread to remind us of how obsolete it is. So... Let's hijack the thread! Anyone know of a good SMAA injector for PA?
