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PC games lacking native Anti-Aliasing (AA) support

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ph0b0s

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Jan 19, 2010
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There has been a worrying trend over the past few years. The PC is now treated as a second class gaming system, I.E games are first developed for consoles and then 'ported' to the PC. Due to this a few features that were standard for PC games, are now commonly AWOL. To me the most important of these is Anti-Aliasing. There are so many releases now where developers do not bother implementing it. It can sometimes be forced via GPU drivers, but that is pot luck depending on game engine and does not look as good as native in engine AA. Also developers should not be relying on ATI and Nvidia to do their work for them, as with Starcraft II recently. A game made for only for the PC, shame on Blizzard....

There seems to be the belief that, just because a game to the PC, is played at much higher resolutions, AA is not required. I play at 1920 x 1200 and it is always very obvious when a game does not support AA.

Anyway I wanted to make a thread with a definitive updated list of games that don't support AA or have to be forced, so a buyer can know before getting a game if there is AA support or not. Knowing this certainly changes whether I will buy a game or not.

Anyway here is what I have so far please post updates or corrections or links if someone else has already made a list like this.

Mass Effect 2
- Can be forced somewhat with Nvidia, ATI drivers

Bioshock
- Can be forced with Nvidia drivers. Forcing through Nvidia drivers gives big artifacts on water in some areas when the 'Real Time Reflection' in-game options is enabled (Forceware Ver 197.45). ATI?

Dead Space
- Uses edge smoothing and cannot be forced for AA

GTA IV
-None, cannot be forced on. ENBSeries mod for supersampling?

GTA IV - Liberty City Stories
-None, cannot be forced on.

Battlefield Bad Company 2
- None with DX9. Supported natively with DX10, 11 but not applied to a lot of in game objects.

Starcraft II
- Can be forced with Nvidia and ATI 10.7a Drivers.

Batman Arkham Asylum
- Native support for Nvidia cards, needs to be forced in CCC with ATI cards.

Singularity
- Can be forced with Nvidia drivers (big performance hit), ATI?

Aliens vs. Predator 2010
- Only with DX11?

Risen
- Can be forced with Nhancer, ATI?

Wolfenstien 2009
- As far as I can tell no AA and cannot be forced

BorderLands
- Can be forced with Nvidia drivers, ATI?

Divinity II
- None, cannot be forced on.

Fuel
-Games has AA setting tat do not work. Fixed by a patch yet?

Gothic 4
- Turned on via video drivers?
 
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Although I partially agree with you, you must understand that many pc games don't have AA because it's hard to implement with certain forms of HDR. Eve online for example does not have in game AA, and that's clearly not a port. I agree though that all these games using the unreal 3 engine have no excuse.
 
Bit surprised about SC2 (but maybe it too use deferred shading -- could see it using a lot of lights), but I guess the rest of the games use deferred rendering. AA is costly when using deferred rendering.

This (p23-) explains why MSAA is incompatible with an engine built on deferred rendering.
 
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It's been a problem for a while, I think DX10 made 4xAA mandatory, or something like that, yet we dont see native support in a lot of games.

I track AA support for games and link to fixes on www.pcgamingstandards.com , it's not been updated in ages but I will pay some attention to it and update it when I have time.
 
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ya I too was surprised about sc2 not having aa support in game. Now admittedly it's less noticeable than say mass effect 2's lack of aa but it seems like a pc only game in development for over a decade could implement a feature given in nearly every game.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
It's been a problem for a while, I think DX10 made 4xAA mandatory, or something like that, yet we dont see native support in a lot of games.
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I believe DX10-compliant GPUs must support at least 4x RGMSAA. Games do not have to support anti-aliasing of any type.
 
phide said:
I believe DX10-compliant GPUs must support at least 4x RGMSAA. Games do not have to support anti-aliasing of any type.
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IIRC DX10 (and DX10.1) allows shaders to read/write to individual samples (and depth) from render targets in a deferred rendering environment. Without this data, MSAA is impossible. With it, developers can do a little extra work and get MSAA working again.

Around the time Bioshock came out, many titles were starting to use deferred rendering to speed up scenes with lots of lights (forward rendering gets expensive with lots of lights, deferred does not), thus sacrificing MSAA for performance. Unreal Engine 3 (and all of the games that use it) also uses deferred rendering. Mass Effect too. Limited budgets, limited timeframes, and rather slow adoption of DX10 made it fairly unlikely that developers would take the time to get MSAA working for comparatively small group of users.

I hate aliasing as much as the OP, but such a strong sentiment against jaggies is not universal within the development community. When you have performance constraints to adhere to, it's hard to hold on to AA when you're 10ms over budget, etc.
 
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Many of those games are built with the UR3 engine, so technically you should combine them to one data point. Still it is a disturbing trend that I think is largely based on the popularity of the shit consoles.
 
Its actually more the fault of the fact that the most widely used engine of this generation, the Unreal 3 engine, does not properly support AA. It's that simple really.

Yes there are some workarounds/tricks you can use for some titles built on certain versions of the engine providing the devs don't use some of the options which conflict with AA (edge lighting or whatever its called ?) - but at the end of the day its not entirely the fault of the devs but the developers of the engine who need to take the majority of any 'blame' you want to pass around.
 
How do you know for certain that the AA is working though?

I enabled it in GTA 4 through the Nvidia control panel, and thought that I had successfully forced it. But it was just my mind playing tricks on me, of course.
 
Is anyone really skipping on Borderlands, Batman:AA, Mass Effect 2, BC2, SC2, and GTA4 because there is no AA or a lack or native AA support? I have to tell you, these are some grade-a amazing games (for story and gameplay) and I'd buy some of them even if they looked like PS1 games...
 
I agree it would be nice to have more AA enabled in games. But its hardly a reason not to buy a game imo. Then again I play most games at 1920x1080 and the jags aren't that noticeable. But still i do wish more had it.
 
Grid has native support for AA...

Honestly the only game i've come across that doesn't support AA is ME(2).
 
In Just Cause 2 the AA at 32x tricks you into thinking that image is clearer. Obviously the image is sharper, but you tend to think it's actually clearer. It's just a lot easier on the eyes.
 
Drexion said:
Its actually more the fault of the fact that the most widely used engine of this generation, the Unreal 3 engine, does not properly support AA. It's that simple really.

Yes there are some workarounds/tricks you can use for some titles built on certain versions of the engine providing the devs don't use some of the options which conflict with AA (edge lighting or whatever its called ?) - but at the end of the day its not entirely the fault of the devs but the developers of the engine who need to take the majority of any 'blame' you want to pass around.
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I always wonder if it just a coincidence that UE3 runs perfectly on X360 , has problems on pc and is major PITA for coding on ps3.
 
Under a typical renderer, enabling hardware AA is as simple as changing 1 line when starting shit up.

No AA is a DX9 limitation, if you use a deferred technique, you need to use DX10+ to get correct AA.


Michaelius said:
I always wonder if it just a coincidence that UE3 runs perfectly on X360 , has problems on pc and is major PITA for coding on ps3.
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i'm not sure where you're getting these problems for but it's pretty equal on both consoles and is well optimized for PC.
 
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ryken said:
Is anyone really skipping on Borderlands, Batman:AA, Mass Effect 2, BC2, SC2, and GTA4 because there is no AA or a lack or native AA support? I have to tell you, these are some grade-a amazing games (for story and gameplay) and I'd buy some of them even if they looked like PS1 games...
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I am in no way with this tread saying 'Don't buy games that don't have AA'. I thought a definitive list might be good, so people are aware before buying a game what they are getting without having to trawl lots of forums.

Dion said:
I agree it would be nice to have more AA enabled in games. But its hardly a reason not to buy a game imo. Then again I play most games at 1920x1080 and the jags aren't that noticeable. But still i do wish more had it.
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Don't know what to say. I play at 1920 x 1200 and the jags are always very obvious to me.

So is no AA the biggest problem in the world ever? No. But it is annoying and if we accept it without complaint, what's next, having the resolution in games limited to 720p because that is what most games on consoles use and it is a pain to make higher res textures?
 
Curious.

What res does AA become a non issue (meaning no use for it anymore)?
2560x1440 or even QUXGA?
 
It isn't so much resolution but pixel density and how far you sit from the display. Your typical LCD has 100 pixels per inch (or less). Even at over 300 pixels per inch on my phone, aliasing is still apparent, but that's from 8 to 12 inches.

A 23" display at 4K or 5K would probably negate the need for anti-aliasing somewhat but not entirely.
 
phide said:
Your typical LCD has 100 pixels per inch (or less). Even at over 300 pixels per inch on my phone, aliasing is still apparent, but that's from 8 to 12 inches.
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What?

My 23.6" screen is 1920x1080 resolution. Its pixel density is 8716 pixels per square inch. Do you mean a row of pixels (one inch long) is 100 or less?
 
more people with hi res monitors now,= less jaggies = less need for AA? this isn;t the time of 1024 x768 games any more.....
 
more people with hi res monitors now,= less jaggies = less need for AA? this isn;t the time of 1024 x768 games any more.....
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You overestimate the effect of resolution on jaggies. With the typical distance between a pc gamer and his monitor (around 3 feet I would say) even a 2560 x 1600 monitor would have extremely noticeable aliasing. You would need an absurd resolution to make aliasing unnoticeable at that distance. It has nothing to do with people using a resolution that is to low.

And although many people say AA is difficult with certain game engines I have yet to have a game that I couldn't force AA on through either the nvidia control panel or nhancer (I have an nvidia card). Many games don't have in game AA and can't be forced by the driver control panel but even for them their are ways to do it using 3rd party software, mods, or tweaks that work perfectly. So clearly it can't be that difficult if the users can figure it out in a few hours.
 
Pixel density typically goes up with screen size although that seems slightly counter intuative actually the resolution increase tends to slightly exceed the size increase between monitors as a ratio. There are some exceptions obviously but typically speaking it's a good rule of thumb

30" at 2560x1600 is 100.6 PPI
24" at 1920x1200 is 94.3 PPI
22" at 1680x1050 is 90 PPI
19" at 1440x900 is 89.3 PPI
17" at 1280x800 is 88.76 PPI

The other factor is that people tend to sit closer to small monitors and further from larger monitors meaning that the resolution per visible area tends to be exaggerated even more than it is causing the effective PPI to seem that much higher on larger monitors.

I actually notice aliasing way less on my 2560x1600 monitor compared pretty much anything else I've seen, it does exist but you find that something like 2x AA is enough to make it more or less invisible, compared to something like a 1680x1050 22" panel where 2xAA doesn't seem anywhere near as effective.

it comes with a trade off though, all per pixel effects are more costly with more pixels and at 2560x1600 you're talking 4 million pixels compared to only 1 million at something like 1280x800 so 2xAA is much more computationally expensive at 30".
 
NaturalViolence said:
Many games don't have in game AA and can't be forced by the driver control panel but even for them their are ways to do it using 3rd party software, mods, or tweaks that work perfectly. So clearly it can't be that difficult if the users can figure it out in a few hours.
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Details? So the work arounds can be added to the list at the start.
 
Game list updated. Are there any that I have missed or that anyone can see is incorrect?
 
Actually, after playing some old games recently, but not that old, Bioshock, Oblivion. Another thing that is now also starting to disappear, is 7.1 sound output from games. Because consoles only have 5.1, that is how much recent PC games get as well. A real step backwards. At least their are some new games that still do it, like Battlefield Bad Company 2....

But I suppose this is a whole different topic....
 
Yeah, this is definitely a result of games being built for consoles. I don't think any of Capcom's PC ports do 7.1 either. I think it's weird that their audio system isn't built on something scalable.

I like to play my consoles and PC equally and I'm looking forward to the next generation of consoles because by that time they should be able to use hardware that lets them run games native at 1080p (not scale them!) with some level of AA and do 7.1 PCM over HDMI. If they still use Dolby Digital to send 5.1 over HDMI then they're effing idiots.
 
Using a high resolution like 2304x1440 on the relatively small screen of my FW900 CRT monitor is great for games that don't support AA. It hides jaggies a lot, but as stated earlier in the thread, does not eliminate them as well as actual AA.

Though I'm playing through Dead Space for the first time right now 2304x1440 without AA, and the graphics are stunning.
 
djoye said:
Yeah, this is definitely a result of games being built for consoles.
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Not in the case of StarCraft 2 however. It hasn't been announced for consoles. I think this is just a case of Activision up to their usual scheme of rushing games to the market before they are completed.
 
ZodaEX said:
Not in the case of StarCraft 2 however. It hasn't been announced for consoles. I think this is just a case of Activision up to their usual scheme of rushing games to the market before they are completed.
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err yeah, I saw SC2. Maybe they were being lazy bums on that one.
 
shansoft said:
why the heck SC2 need 3D....?

its just seems weird..:confused:
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It doesn't need 3D. It's just going to be an optional display mode. What is "weird" though? You get a different answer from everyone you ask. Some people think RTS games are weird. How are you supposed to effectively control 200 units at once? Crazy!
 
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