Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

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Saiya the Lotus
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Saiya the Lotus »

It's sad to see most of you talking like this is a deal breaker....It isn't to me, i would kill to have such a rig like yours Veph....My rig has served me for over six years....no upgrades at all in that period....I'm praying to at least be able to play this expac....
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Xella »

Slickrock wrote:Regarding Mac, I'm on a new MacPro (DarthMac) with the D300 cards, and I'm not seeing any problems in the beta. I realize that there are lot of older systems out there, but a lot of those have much bigger problems with VRAM.
What AA option are you using in beta vs. what multisampling option do you use on live, though? CMAA (the "best" option) is flat out not available to Macs (regardless of what graphics cards we use or how beefy our system is) because we can't run DirectX 11.

If you run Multisampling x1 on Live and No Anti-Aliasing on Beta, you won't see a difference at all. If you run as low as Multisampling x4 on Live and you try to compare that to either of the Mac-available options (FXAA Low and FXAA High), you'll see a significant decrease in your game's appearance. Or maybe you won't, I dunno. I've been slowly titrating my AA down from 8-16x MSAA on live down to 1x so that 6.0 isn't as painful a drop in graphics quality but it's still not helping soften the blow much :(

Different things are dealbreakers for different people. For me, the awful AA isn't a dealbreaker but it could easily combine with a lot of my other issues with WoD so far (ranging from the new models being so off-model to the handling of certain lore events to that windowed-fullscreen bug that was thankfully fixed in build 18848 to Orcs Orcs Orcs Orcs Orcs and the Iron Horde aesthetic being practically identical to the True Kor'kron Horde aesthetic I've been staring at for nearly a year in SoO now) to be so. Some people find the combination of the various druid non-combat forms a dealbreaker. Some people find the removal of cast-while-moving a dealbreaker. Back in classic, they added a bedroll or something (like the orc wolf mounts have) to the back of the nightsaber mounts and that was absolutely 100% a dealbreaker for me and was the only time since the game launched and my physical copy arrived in the mail that my account has not had an active subscription and to this day I have nightmares about some poor blizzard phone staffer out there having to deal with the crazy woman who called in tears to deactivate her account and cited "ass carpets" as the reason for the cancellation. Different priorities, and even if some of them seem silly from an outside perspective, it's really only the inside perspective that matters in the end.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by zedxrgal »

Saiya the Lotus wrote:It's sad to see most of you talking like this is a deal breaker....It isn't to me, i would kill to have such a rig like yours Veph....My rig has served me for over six years....no upgrades at all in that period....I'm praying to at least be able to play this expac....
I make no bones about the lack of AA causing me to play less if at all. I will never leave WoW completely unless I truly and fully fell out of love with the game etc. Please do not assume how people mean things. I've worked very hard to scratch and save for my gaming rigs to keep the immersion feeling in my games because that's what it is FOR ME. Does't mean I'm going to toss my hands up and :cry: and leave WoW forever. Just means my already limited play time (due to real life, work etc) is going to be even less.
I've played since launch in 04. I don't think something like this could make me swear off the game forever.

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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Saiya the Lotus »

zedxrgal wrote:
Saiya the Lotus wrote:It's sad to see most of you talking like this is a deal breaker....It isn't to me, i would kill to have such a rig like yours Veph....My rig has served me for over six years....no upgrades at all in that period....I'm praying to at least be able to play this expac....
I make no bones about the lack of AA causing me to play less if at all. I will never leave WoW completely unless I truly and fully fell out of love with the game etc. Please do not assume how people mean things. I've worked very hard to scratch and save for my gaming rigs to keep the immersion feeling in my games because that's what it is FOR ME. Does't mean I'm going to toss my hands up and :cry: and leave WoW forever. Just means my already limited play time (due to real life, work etc) is going to be even less.
I've played since launch in 04. I don't think something like this could make me swear off the game forever.
I'm glad to hear that, I just felt like the topic was alot of people acting like this would make them stop playing...that sounds silly to me...
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Xota »

I think they're being honest that higher AA is high on their TODO list. I expect the people working on it are different than the people working on patch content, so there's not the whole "would cost a raid tier" issue. And even though my current machine can't handle higher graphics settings, I like to nerd over the improvements to the graphics engine from a technical standpoint.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Doc Privas »

Thankfully I have Directx11 so I can at least use CMAA, because in the PTR you can only use FXAA and I really hate it. It's nearly unplayable for my eyes :|

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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Danielfboone »

Tenryu wrote:Thankfully I have Directx11 so I can at least use CMAA, because in the PTR you can only use FXAA and I really hate it. It's nearly unplayable for my eyes :|
I have DX 11 with a Radeon R9-270X card, FX-6300 CPU, and Windows 8.1, and the FXAA-low is the setting that looks the best to me. I find it equivalent to MSAA X 4 in the live client which is as high as I ever use. CMAA looks flat and I see more jagged edges with it.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by zedxrgal »

I hate to dredge this up but has there been any word on this at all?? I've noticed that since 6.0 went live I have no more AA options at all.

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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Azunara »

Related, but does this affect water graphics? Ever since the patch, my water has been less smooth and likes far more like it used to.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Danielfboone »

The live patch seems a bit different than the beta did. In the beta the FXAA-low setting looked the best to me. Now, live, FXAA-low looks blurred and dull. The CMAA setting looks brighter and clearer.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Xella »

Azu (and Dani, potentially), make sure your other graphics settings are where you expect them to be—when I logged in on 6.0 day, all my graphics settings were back to default, which included poor water settings and a really short draw distance. I'm still not sure I've got everything back the way it's supposed to be, but it looks a lot better now.

Still looked better when I could run an AA option that didn't blow, tho :P
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by zedxrgal »

For me FXAA-low makes things look like my toons are drunk. :( All blotchy and blurred. CMAA is a little better. Why couldn't they just leave well enough alone.

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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Azunara »

Xella wrote:Azu (and Dani, potentially), make sure your other graphics settings are where you expect them to be—when I logged in on 6.0 day, all my graphics settings were back to default, which included poor water settings and a really short draw distance. I'm still not sure I've got everything back the way it's supposed to be, but it looks a lot better now.

Still looked better when I could run an AA option that didn't blow, tho :P
Got it! I'll do that next time I log in. Thanks for the tip.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Danielfboone »

My graphics settings were at default which for me, was everything on good or high. I have played around a little but eventually pretty much left them that way. I have now determined that the best AA setting for me is FXAA-high. FXAA-low is too blurred and CMAA actually makes the still somewhat jagged edges on some things stand out more.

CMAA has potential. I hope they add more options to it and also add an option to reduce the glow which in some areas, the Pandaria Shrines for example, is really too much. Turning the glow off by the console command also turns off the death effect and reduces or even eliminates some of the underwater effects.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by Azunara »

That did it, thanks! Now my water doesn't look like old school Vanilla crummy water.
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by soukyugurentai »

CMAA and FXAA are both bad. MSAA is superior, but there's only one way to get it working in current versions of WoW. It requires an NVIDIA card and a tool called NVIDIA Inspector. I have tried this with the latest NVIDIA drivers and it still works. It looks fantastic, but there are tradeoffs. DirectX9 must be used in WoW--not DX11. That's already about a 30% hit on framerate due to improvements in DX11.

Here's a very useful video someone made on this subject. I don't think it's been linked in this thread yet but I urge you all to watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlRTZWKxw-s
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Re: Anti-aliasing worries for WoD

Unread post by SpiritBinder »

6.1 is supposed to now bring New Anti-Aliasing Options - MSAA, SSAA, SSAA + CMAA, Yippee!!!!! :D

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