How to get rid of alising and flickering?

[GuntiNDDS]

Hi,

i have been testing the game since alpha and from the start i always had bad alising and flickering in some places that i just cannot get rid off.

Below i prepared a screenshot of an exemplary scene that has both alising and bad flickering. The screenshot was made with FXAA Antialising-Mode selected,
which is the only Antialising mode that gives me a reduction in alising.

Spoiler

The green boxes mark alising problem areas and the red box marks the flickering problem area. The problems are very apparent when moving the view
around using trackir.

I am using a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660 TI and my native screen resolution is 1920x1200. I use the latest drivers as of today (28.12.14)

Tried enabling all the different DSR factors in the general tab of the nvidia control panel's 3d settings but they made no difference. I suppose my card does not support it.
Also tried forcing antialising options through the nvidia control panel but i could not get any improvment to the above mentioned issues.

Please post here if you have any advice on other possible solutions (e.g. changes to some ed configuration files or similar).


Thanks.

 

[Yodafone]

There's not much worse than jagged AA lines, particularly when moving (obviously). I'm not sure if anything I'm about to say will help you on nVidia because I'm using ATi, but in my ATi's API (Catalyst Control Center) I have options to change the Anit-Aliasing method which solved a very similar issue as you describe.

There are 3 options for this AA method, Multi-Sampling, Adaptive Multi-Sampling, and SuperSampling, with each an increase in performance strain. I actually set mine to SuperSampling which I would have presumed would have made it worse because of the extra processing power needed, but it fixed it for me (perhaps forcing the card to work harder has fixed it, who knows how these things work).

Do you have any adjustments with your nVidia API, as presumably changing anything in Elite has made no difference?

Lancer

 

[GuntiNDDS]

I tried to enforce the following settings through the nvidia control panel, but it seems like either they make no difference or the game ignores them:

 

[Yodafone]

Ok.. I also have an Anti-Aliasing Method, which has the option for "Use Application Setting", with this selected the game presumably overrides with preference, of anything you may have set in your APi. As much as I haven't set mine to "Override Aplication Settings" in my APi, have you an option to do this, so your APi has preference, not the game? Is that the Antialiasing Modus? What does that say next to it selected? I don't speak German

Lancer

 

[GuntiNDDS]

It has four options:

- Use application settings
- Off
- Extend the application settings
- Suspend the application settings

I have no tested them using the fourth option and also setting them in the "glopbal settings" tab instead of the application specific tab. Also noticed that when enabling DSR in the general tab, i have to switch the resolution in the ingame settings too in order for it to become effective. With theese changes i notice a slight improvement in the flickering and alising.

For DSR i now use 1.5x and 30% smoothing which seems to be the treshold for my card in order to still have a good frame rate.

I guess that further improvements would require an upgraded graphics card in order to increase the DSR factor more.

 

[Yodafone]

Forgive me, did you say you had not tried the fourth option or you have? Suspending the application settings to override any option in Elite may help, but if you did try this and no change then fair enough.

What I do find interesting is enabling dynamic super resolution actually helped the situation, forcing the game to upscale and then back down again, as if similar to mine, forcing the card to work harder is sometimes the fix. But then if this DSR option actually increased the resolution and then back down to your monitor's resolution (which I'm pretty sure is what it does), then AA is not as critical with the higher resolution initially set by the DSR, so perhaps is why it helped.

If you turn AA off completely and just use this DSR to improve your resolution, does it appear better than not using DSR, and your original AA settings with your monitor's native resolution?

Sorry I can't help much further, I do know Anti-Aliasing is a processing hungry option to use, perhaps like you say, you've simply reached the capability of your card.

Lancer

 

[Leak]

I'm afraid all those control panel settings aren't going to do anything in Elite, like in most newer games, as their use of deferred rendering for lighting and shadows makes all "regular" anti-aliasing settings non-functioning - that's why all anti-aliasing settings in-game are for shader-based methods of anti-aliasing.

The thing here is that shader-based anti-aliasing works as a post-processing pass on the image, i.e. it tries to detect high-contrast steps in the image and then smooths those - but if there's huge gaps between parts of a line it won't even detect those as being connected...

Of course, DSR (and now AMDs VSR that's pretty much the same) helps here as the higher resolution means there's less disconnected lines, but at extremes like in the above screenshot it probably won't help.

I'm afraid there's pretty much nothing you can do here with today's graphics hardware to fix this.

 

[GuntiNDDS]

In regards the options, what i tried first was the 3rd option that reads "extend the application settings" and then later i switched it to "suspend the application settings". I would definitly agree that after figuring out how to enable it properly, using the DSR gave the biggest impact on improving alising and flickering. It's also possible that the antialising settings actually didnt change anything as suggested. It is kind of hard to tell because the percieved improvments are only very slight (without DSR). Even with the 1,5x DSR there is still very noticeable alising and flickering but definitly better then before, so i am glad i got at least some improvement there.

I am going to do some hardware upgrading next year so then i can try what improvements higher DSR like 3x or 4x make.

Thanks for your help and suggestions and also thanks to Leak for your technical explanation.

 

[Mephane]

I've got the same issue and apparently, so does everyone else. Ever since noticing I have noticed it in other people's videos etc., too. I've also played around with all the ingame and driver settings and the effect, even when all is cranked up to the absolute maximum, is very minimal.

 

[Lasse B.]

You can get rid of some aliasing and flickering by enabling SMAA in the game's options. Don't confuse this with MSAA though.

 

[Bambi]

Currently the only good way to do antialiasing is to use downsampling.

 

[MartinW]

This is the worsts game I run for aliasing. I've tread everything. Not acceptable in this day and age, with modern hardware.

 

[Berty Dastard]

Had no problems with this in the game until I downloaded the latest driver. I made the mistake of using Geforce Experience prog to give me optimal settings - it did not and suddenly jagged orbit lines appeared. Mostly improved them by changing the ingame option to SMAA

 

[Lasse B.]

This is the worsts game I run for aliasing. I've tread everything. Not acceptable in this day and age, with modern hardware.

Games now need to provide such options by themselves because the deferred shading used in modern games currently makes it impossible to force anti aliasing through driver settings. So in a way it is because of modern games and hardware that anti aliasing has become problematic.

You can read more about that here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading

 

[MartinW]

An interesting article, thanks for posting that.

 

[Aquila Oculus]

This is the worsts game I run for aliasing. I've tread everything. Not acceptable in this day and age, with modern hardware.

You should see Alien: Isolation.

I started a thread on their official boards that had 138 replies. On a board where there was little to no activity at the time that was a lot. A lot of people complaining and rightly so. The only solution we could come up with was the use of DSR, and boy did it look good with the jaggies gone.

Once I had my G1 970 I cranked DSR right up and hey presto, no more shimmering jaggies.

So as a result of my experience, if you want the best visuals, you need the best hardware I'm afraid (The 980 is the best but I'll be SLI'ing my 970 when the Rift comes out).

DSR really does work, and looks fantastic. Even older games look bang up to date using it.

 

[JetJaguar]

Aliasing in modern games bugs the heck out of me too. For years we would play around with MSAA, setting it to 8x, watching our FPS plummet...but dreaming of how great it will be when we can run this AA on all our games as our GPUs will be so powerful! Then we would go and put it back to 2xMSAA and put up with some jaggies. Now, once we have the horse power to run 8x AA with no problem, none of the new games are compatible with it anymore! So we get really nice lighting but crappy flickering and jagged edges. Console ports are usually the worst offenders for this. I just got the new Wolfenstein recently and there is no AA at all in that game. It looks fantastic...but jeez, the jaggies would make your eyes bleed .

It was such a sweet ability to turn off AA in game and just control it yourself with the Nvidia control panel etc. This just doesn't work in any new game anymore.

We are getting nice options from Nvidia such as PostProcess AA and DSR, but I do miss the good old MSAA and it's flexibility.

+1 to ED trying to get us some better AA in the near future.

 

[p2k]

Hi,

i have been testing the game since alpha and from the start i always had bad alising and flickering in some places that i just cannot get rid off.

Below i prepared a screenshot of an exemplary scene that has both alising and bad flickering. The screenshot was made with FXAA Antialising-Mode selected,
which is the only Antialising mode that gives me a reduction in alising.

Spoiler

The green boxes mark alising problem areas and the red box marks the flickering problem area. The problems are very apparent when moving the view
around using trackir.

I am using a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660 TI and my native screen resolution is 1920x1200. I use the latest drivers as of today (28.12.14)

Tried enabling all the different DSR factors in the general tab of the nvidia control panel's 3d settings but they made no difference. I suppose my card does not support it.
Also tried forcing antialising options through the nvidia control panel but i could not get any improvment to the above mentioned issues.

Please post here if you have any advice on other possible solutions (e.g. changes to some ed configuration files or similar).


Thanks.

I use the DSR the whole time and the game looks way better. For instance most of the aliasing of the orbit lines are gone. When activating the 4x DSR did you change the resolution ingame to 3960x2160? If not you will never notice a difference.

 

[Antmax]

The new Super sampling in beta 1.1 works wonders for AA. BUT 2x uses too many resources. With DSR 1.75 is the limit on my 970. Steady 60fps in most places. SS x2 I'm mid 40's but the shimmering pixels and almost non existent AA is gone.

 

[Katkon]

I have tried every in-game and NVidia control panel setting to reduce jagged lines and flickering, but no avail. The GPU is a Titan. Edit: I haven't tried this in beta; just in the current build.