SEV - Menu performance / antialiasing

[scratch]

Could you try the same thing with deactivated VSync, Phoenix-D? Just to see if you experience the same fps drop.

[NullAshton]

I'm thinking he means disabling it in the global settings, not setting it to application controlled.

[Phoenix-D]

NullAshton said:
I'm thinking he means disabling it in the global settings, not setting it to application controlled.

SE5 doesn't have a AA setting so application controlled is the same as "off".

That said I lose 5FPS by turning AA on. Whoops de do. Apparently its a video card specific issue. I lose *100* FPS going to the ship design screen though, which is just bizzare.

[Q]

Please forgive my ignorance:

What is antialiasing and how do you acticate/deactivate it?

[Phoenix-D]

Anti-alising is activated either by an in-game menu or in your graphics card settings.

What it does is smooth out the "jaggies" created by low resolutions. Take a circle drawn in a 10x10 'screen'. It'll look a lot less smooth than one drawn in a 100x100 screen, because you don't have as many pixels to draw the edges with.

What AA does is take those rough edges and smooth them out a bit, giving you the effect of higher resolutions without as much of a performance hit.

Or that's what its *supposed* to do; it doesn't always work out.

[Q]

Thank you very much for your answer. I learn every day something new.
As far as I understood you can't change the antialiasing for SE V alone but you would have to change it for your entire computer. Is that correct?

[Phoenix-D]

Depending on your video card, yes. Most of them also have tools where you can force AA on or off for only one program.

[DarkHorse]

Q said:
Thank you very much for your answer. I learn every day something new.
As far as I understood you can't change the antialiasing for SE V alone but you would have to change it for your entire computer. Is that correct?

Here's a technical description of anti-aliasing: wikipedia

In a nutshell, it blows up a frame by a certain factor (2x, 4x, etc) and finds all the edges, then dithers those edges, and finally shrinks the frame back down to be rendered at the initial resolution. The higher the number (2x, 4x) the finer the softening of the edges will be (and the sharper the images will seem), at the cost of higher video memory/gpu cycle requirements.

[DarkHorse]

Another good explanation of anti-aliasing, and as a bonus, anisotropic filtering:
Hardware.info