Elemental - SuperSampling - AntiAliasing ( SGSSAA ) with Nvidia Inspector
Elemental Forums
Stardock implemented an in-game anti-aliasing switch which works well. Once activated, polygon edges are smooth, which is a must have nowadays in my opinion. Unfortunately, transparent textures need more advanced filter techologies and Nvidia therefore provides three approaches at least.
There are two Transparency-Antialiasing-Modes availiable within the driver control panel that are exlusively applied on alpha tests (TMSAA and TSSAA). Utilizing external tools like Nvidia's SGSSAA-Tool or Orbmu2k's NVIDIA Inspector one can also makle use of full-screen Supersampling-Antialiasing, under eye-candy enthusiasts called SGSSAA due to it's sparse grid.
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2624
http://blog.orbmu2k.de/category/tools
SGSSAA puts heavy load on your graphics card and most likely will not give you playable framerates on mainstream hardware.
Above Screenshots show Elemental - War of Magic with 8xMSAA activated in-game. Also note that 16x High Quality Anisotropic Filtering was forced. You can see smooth polygon edges, but if you look at transparencies like the bushes on the ground, they appear to look very "crisp" or hard-edged. As soon as the camera moves, those image parts will start flickering. The third screenshot shows the font rendering as it is out of the box for reference.
Next set of screenshots show in-game 8xMSAA enhanced to 8xMSAA + 8xSGSSA using NVIDIA Inspector. The Nvidia driver does not apply LOD-Bias correction automatically, so it has to be adjusted to -1.5 by hand (some prefer not to go that far, but that is another story). As you can see the plants on the ground no longer appear unfiltered and flickering when moving the camera is dramatically reduced. You can also see the heavy performance impact on my GTX460 1GB, framerates droped from 60FPS (VSync) to 28FPS.
There is one big problem now with Elemental's graphics engine. No matter if through enhancement or by forcing SGSSAA, the whole image will suffer from some blur all over the place. As the Kingdom Report shows, even fonts become washed-out and hard to read.
Fortunately Nvidia allows it's customers to manually tweak anti-aliasing compatibility bits and thanks to "Blaire", who is a fellow forums user at 3dcenter.org and very deep into this, I was able to get rid of the blur. The compatibility bits of choice for Elemental - War of Magic (and most likely Fallen Enchantress ?!) are 0x00001245.
Attention: You need to disable in-game AntiAliasing to get rid of the blur, otherwise it will interfere and mess things up!
Note that these bits also work work with 4xMSAA + 4xSGSSAA and then result in playable framerates even on my relatively slow GTX460 while still providing good eye-candy. Correct the LOD-Bias by -1.0 or slightly less for 4xSGSSAA.
Have fun and get the best out of your Nvidia hardware! I was not able to get TMSAA or TSSAA working though and while Blaire told me, OGSSAA as well as hybrid modes are also working fine with these bits, I believe that SGSSAA is the way to go and results in the best image quality overall.
