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The highly-anticipated Half-Life 2 game will have a major bug with current DirectX 9.0 hardware resulting in impossibility in enabling Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing, a popular feature that dramatically improves image quality in games. Apparently, there is a limitation in DirectX 9.0 and/or DirectX 9.0-compliant hardware that will not allow the function to be enabled on certain graphics cards if the workaround is not found.

According a Valve officials quoted in forums at HalfLife2.net web-site, there are problems with the way that current hardware implements FSAA. If you enable it, you will see a lot of artifacts on polygon boundaries due to the way that current graphics processors sample texture subjects with FSAA enabled.

Valve continued that this is a problem for any application that packs small textures into larger textures. The small textures will bleed into each other if you have multi-sample FSAA enabled.

Currently both leading graphics chips designers use multi-sampling or hybrid multi-sampling + super-sampling methods to for FSAA.

The developers of the legendary Half-Life game said that drivers are not likely to solve the problem, however, it still can be solved for graphics cards based on VPUs from ATI Technologies, such as RADEON 9500-, 9600-, 9700- and 9800-series. As for NVIDIA GeForce and GeForce FX-series, there are practically no chances to find a workaround, according to Valve.

Some industry sources indicated that the problem with such FSAA is a known one and is to be addressed in DirectX 9.1 and next-generation graphics processors with Pixel Shaders 3.0 and Vertex Shaders 3.0, such as ATI Technologies’s code-named R420 and NVIDIA’s code-named NV40 VPUs and derivatives. Both next-generation products will come later than the Half-Life 2 that is expected to be available by October.

You can find the thread on the matter with quotes from Valve officials here.

Stay tuned with us because we are looking forward to bring you some comments from ATI Technologies and NVIDIA about the situation.

Discussion

Comments currently: 9
Discussion started: 07/18/03 06:09:09 PM
Latest comment: 08/05/03 07:11:35 AM
Expand all threads | Collapse all threads

[1-8]

1. 
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=142176#142176

Forbidden Donut posted the following:
I sent sireric a PM asking if ATI was aware of this issue and what possible solutions would be. This is what he said.

[Quote, SirEric of ATI said]
It's not a special mode of AA. It has to do with the method used to sample textures. If you render a partial pixel, you need to sample the texture at that pixel to get a color for the fragment. What texture coordinate do you use for a partially covered pixel? You can use the pixel center (which is what is done in current drivers/specs), or, the R3xx allows you to sample at the centroid of the fragment.

Both systems have problems. Center of pixel can lead to sampling outside the texture, and then the application has to create a buffer region outside to compensate (but that buffer region can be unlimited, depending on the pixel/texel ratio). If you use centroid, you avoid that problem, but can create new ones in cases where you only want to sample a texel once (i.e. menus and text). We would need to way to allow the application to specify the kind of sampling wanted on each texture. That's not in the API now. However, the HW can do it. We might be able to do something in the control panel.
[End Quote]

My own personal interpretation after hearing from both sireric and the people down at valve is that there's a very strong chance that FSAA is able to be done on ATI's hardware. I suppose only time will tell what happens though.
[Posted by: BRiT  | Date: 07/18/03 06:09:09 PM]

2. 
This is so idiotic! I mean, people who developed the engine used what video card, I may ask? On-board, it seems...

[Posted by: AnCow  | Date: 07/19/03 02:28:12 AM]

3. 
Ahh, shit. I that have a Nvidia Geforce IV TI4200 64MB... :(

But anyway, FSAA isn't so important anyway. :P
[Posted by: Loke  | Date: 07/19/03 06:28:09 AM]

4. 
I Really hope they get this issue fixed before release time, I just recent got a 9800 pro and run 6x FSAA with Everything, it makes ALOT of differance.
After doing an imagine test last night using 6x FSAA and no FSAA situations, and res's ranging from 640x480 to 1920x1440, I discovered 800x600 w/ 6x FSAA looks alot crisper and cleaner then 1920x1440 w/ no FSAA ... !, I would rather play HL2 @ 800x600 w/ 6x FSAA then I would anything higher w/o FSAA, so to me, this is a big issue. But I trust in valve and ATI
[Posted by: NucHaz  | Date: 07/19/03 09:35:31 AM]

5. 
I've same problem in latest DirectX 9 games like TRAOD. I cannot enable FSAA. My next card will be an ATI cause latest nvidia drivers has lots of cheats & lots of bugs.
[Posted by: Walter  | Date: 07/20/03 04:46:38 AM]
+ expand thread (1 answer)

6. 
This reads like Valve has gotten into the game of graphics card politics. Shame on them! They need to follow the example that ID sets by making SURE that their games are compatible with multiple cards, graphics standards, and Operating Systems. This is just pathetic. This is the reason I stick with ID games and nVidia cards. They are both very friendly towards open standards.
[Posted by: Gamer23423  | Date: 07/21/03 03:22:26 PM]

7. 
"They need to follow the example that ID sets by making SURE that their games are compatible with multiple cards, graphics standards, and Operating Systems."

Um, the game IS compatible with NVIDIA cards. Nowhere does it say otherwise. You just have to run it without FSAA, which isn't a huge deal anyway. Nobody is going to criticize id because Doom III won't support bumpmapping on a GeForce 1 card.
[Posted by: Black Hitler  | Date: 07/22/03 10:21:17 PM]

8. 
Publish the application bug. Valve fixes the FSAA bug on all video cards. http://www.ctnstone.com/valve_irc.php
[Posted by: GreySkull  | Date: 08/05/03 07:11:35 AM]

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