Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Quick Tip for Better Visuals

I know I haven't posted anything in forever, and this isn't a download, but whatever. It's good knowledge to know.

What you need to do, if you have a graphics card that has a configuration program (ATI cards have Catalyst Control Center, NVidia cards have something similar), you need to open it up, find "Anisotropic Filtering" and set it to at least 4x, preferably 8x, or 16x if you think your performance won't suffer.

Why?

Well, here's before 8x Anisotropic Filtering (Remember, you can open the pictures to see them bigger):


And here's after:


Doesn't that ground texture look fantastic now? It's no longer blurry just 4 feet from the camera, and it even looks better close to the camera. What Anisotropic Filtering does is it basically renders the textures in a different way so that they look better when the camera is at different angles.

Here are some more examples of before and after anisotropic filtering:

Check out the windows. The ground in the park works, too.


And the water, too. It looks better.


And in this one, the ground texture is better again- but check out the dining tables. Even they look better now.


It also very subtly makes beards a bit more detailed (very, very subtly, though). Same with freckles.

5 comments:

  1. Awesome! I always wondered what the heck anisotropic filtering did. I can definitely tell a difference between the before and after pics. Thanks for this post!

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  2. Anisotropic Filtering is a MUST for every game!

    What it does, is to increase the range of where the texture will be rendered with full detail.
    Improving tiling and less-blurriness;
    If set to none it will render the engine's default and from where the camera is current at, the texture will look very blurry and in point to say: "EW"!

    Just a note, this will increase the memory of your graphics card, since it will hae to work more to render full detail of the current setting.
    But AF (Anisotropic Filtering) is not much memory-eater as the AA (Anti-Aliasing) filter.

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  3. Thank you so much for this information :),
    I have always used ATI cards and I never used the Catalyst Control Center and would always uninstall it because I I thought it was just a useless thing to have and would only download the updated display driver.
    I can see a difference in all the pictures so I'll have to try this out and see how it works on my computer.
    Got any more tips to share?

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  4. holy snap! thank you so much for this! ;)

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