SEV - Menu performance / antialiasing

[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.

[Suicide Junkie]

I'd say that it is very likely your anti-aliasing is choking on the every-other-pixel transparency effects in the design screen...
Basically, every single pixel on the screen looks like a jaggie, and the result would be blurring of the picture.

[DarkHorse]

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

[TurinTurambar]

I suppose this is as good a thread as any to post my problem.
It was advised on the IRC last night that if my computer could run Starfury, it should run SE:V just fine; that is not the case at all apparently. Once the game is open, my entire system is taxed. Not only does the game operate sluggishly (more on that in a minute) but everything slows down. I was trying to chat at the same time, and sometimes had to wait 10 or 15 seconds for what I typed in the send-line to even show up. The mouse ghosted. The windows start menu opened only after a long delay. Et cetera ad nauseum.
Now the game itself: Opening the game is ok. Going thru all the setup and empire options and all that is all fine. However, once the game actually starts playing.... <Insert sound of Millennium Falcon hyper-drive failure here> The mouse in-game behaves like it's stuck in molasses. I move it, it disappears, it reappears and slides to a halt somewhere in the direction I moved it.

This system is no slouch (though I'll admit the vid-card is a bit lacking) and as I stated before, it plays Starfury very well, even the 3d-rendered battles. I'm looking for ways to fix this.

• I can't find an antialiasing setting in the advanced setup of my card.
• Can I turn off the rotation of the planets in the main screen or something?
• Should I spend $200 on a new card to play this buggy-*** game?

System:
XP Pro sp2
2.4ghz Intel P4
1.5GB RAM
Matrox Millennium G550 with latest drivers and DirectX 9.0