Catalyst 3D settings......Worthless??

[Dr. Righteous]

Don't know if anyone has ever benefited from tweaking the 3d settings in the Catalyst menu, but each time I try to improve the image quality for game play, the settings always makes it look worse rather than better.
Got started playing Mass Effect 2 this week and noticed it didn't have AA support.
I game at a relative low resolution (compared to you game eaters out there) of 1280x1024 so my HD5750 card speeds through most everything at max settings. BTW, I have on a 20" CRT monitor because I like the color and a slightly soft image when looking at something with hard edges (like 3D games) so this is ideal. But at lower res, the lack of AA is pretty noticeable. So I change the setting off "use application settings" to adjust the AA up to 4 or 8. Filter is set to edge detect. I go back into the game and it actually looks WORSE.
This is usually the case on most games.
The ONLY benefit I can think of are old games that didn't have AA or the Aniso filtering, etc that can benefit. But other than that, it seems worthless.

 

[Fading Phoenix]

I've been meaning to post on here asking about this. I haven't been sure if it was an isolated issue with me or something.

I remember experimenting with Edge Detect a long while ago and never noticed any issues, I actually thought it had looked incredible for the level of performance decrease-unfortunately the games I was playing I couldn't keep it on and either stuck to none or box at 2. I upgraded video cards eventually though and I tried enabling it again, but games just look horrible with it on. They actually look better with MLAA enabled rather than Edge Detect and MLAA really softens the picture.

Try reverting the antialising filter to box and see if that improves anything for you.

To further this, my father had recently been having troubles with Mass Effect. His were more severe than just poor image quality though, his image would be randomly blocky and his frames were suffering horribly on a 4870. I ran driver sweeper on his computer and updated his driver and the issue went away, but he said it came back after I left and he fiddled with the 3d settings in ccc. I'm not positive on this one yet (I'll find out this weekend), but from what he told me he changed and from what I had already had set for him I'm thinking it was edge detect causing the problem.

 

[SicKlown42012]

I would suggest using RadeonPro to create profiles for your games and adjust settings there. You can even try different AA profiles(along with many more settings than you get in CCC) to see if that clears up your problems. I don't know exactly why you're seeing this because all of the AA options work well for me, and have for the last two years wince I switched back to AMD/ATI hardware.
http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/

 

[Fading Phoenix]

I have radeonpro, and I was thinking about that yesterday. I'm not sure if I've tried setting edge detect in radeonpro since I've started using it, I may have just avoided it. I'm sure I have, but I'll try that out when I can.

I'm on my father's computer and a quick test showed his problem to be the edge detect. He hasn't always had this trouble, and I'm sure he was using edge detect before and it had worked fine. He said it started doing it after a driver update but we'd tried rolling it back with no luck. I'm not home often so it makes it hard to know what was done.
Was just testing it though, original Mass Effect everything at max and box antialising at 8x he gets solid above 54fps. Turn on edge detect at minimum 4x/12x and he's getting 20-25fps and random black flickering boxes across the screen-the boxes seem to go away after a little while though.

I'll have to try my system out again when I get home-it's been a while, maybe magically the problem went away for me-and see if I can take some screenshots of the visual quality on mine.