Unreal Engine 3 and Anti Aliasing (Large images)

[spraduke]

Now as some of you are probably aware and some of you aren't .

A lot of Unreal Engine 3 powered games that have been coming out do not have native support for AA (at least under dx 9.0c).

Further a discussion on the UT3 demo i did some research into the topic and these are my findings.

UE3 uses "Deferred Pixel Rendering" as part of its HDR calculations. What DPR (for short) actually does i'm not sure of.

But what i do know is that dx 9 (windows xp) doesn't have native support for both DPR and AA at the same time. However DX 10 (Vista) does have native support for this and therefor vista users should be able to experience full HDR and AA (via control panel forcing) aslong as their card supports it.

On the topic of cards. All ATI x1000 series upwards and all Nvidia 8000 series are fully capable of rendering HDR and AA at the same time. Lower cards however do not have this ability.

Therefore if you are running one of the aformentioned cards you should be able to play all UE3 games with AA and HDR on. Under dx 9 however you will probably see more of a performance hit than on dx10 however most of these cards have power to spare anyway .

So back to my point!

The UT3 demo will not allow AA even if its forced on in your graphics CP.
However... There is a "workaround" to enabling some AA under dx 9.0 however it is not as effective as it would be in dx 10.

Simply rename your UT3 demo exe (ut3demo.exe) to either Bioshock.exe or r6vegas.exe and (for Nvidia users) under profiles select bioshock and force AA (4x is used in the upcoming screenshots)

This will reduce jaggies but they may still be visible where there is areas of high contrast in brightness (edge of lights or objects against bright skys).

Here are links to some examples of the improvement. (UT3 settings: 1280x1024, 16AF, Post processing muted, 100% screen scaling, everything else set to its highest).

Click for full size

Image 1 No AA

Image 1 Forced AA

Image 2 No AA

Image 2 Forced AA

Image 3 No AA

Image 3 Forced AA

What would be great is if someone running vista and an 8800 series would take similar shots ingame with the same settings to see if there is a noticeable improvement.

Because if UE3 games support AA under dx10 this might be the best argument for getting vista! ( I really HATE jaggies)

 

[spraduke]

Hmm the gallery our website uses obviously isn't compatible with IMG tags. Oh well

 

[Xendance]

What are your settings btw? Just wondering because it looks unbelieveably dark in those screens.

 

[spraduke]

Dunno stock brightness i thought. Doesn't look dark to me :S and i certainly haven't had trouble spotting anyone ingame.

 

[Zips]

I have Vista and an 8800GTS, so I'll give it a go in a bit to see the differences, if I can.

 

[Dillinger]

Hm, I thought AA would clear up some of my problems with the way the engine looks. Unfortunately, it still looks drab, blurry, bland, blocky, and not as good as the early screens and engine videos made it out to look.

 

[Jimmy]

^ Apparently the high-res textures aren't included in the demo to keep the filesize down. From what I've heard they did the same thing in the UT03/04 demos. In the game options supposedly there's no difference in texture quality from 3 upwards. Can't say I've checked it out myself though.

 

[Reddog]

I don't see the big deal with AA, at a high res you barely notice jaggies as it is, all FSAA does is hammer your frame rate for a small visual gain.

 

[Jokerman]

Hm, I thought AA would clear up some of my problems with the way the engine looks. Unfortunately, it still looks drab, blurry, bland, blocky, and not as good as the early screens and engine videos made it out to look.

Seems like "next gen"= opaque fog

 

[Aeneas2020]

^ Apparently the high-res textures aren't included in the demo to keep the filesize down. From what I've heard they did the same thing in the UT03/04 demos. In the game options supposedly there's no difference in texture quality from 3 upwards. Can't say I've checked it out myself though.

i had heard this also...not only was it to keep filesize down but like the crysis beta they don't want people to see the eye popping glory of uber gfx until the release...whether you beleive it or not is another story it seems odd to me that a company trying to sell their engine as much as their game would limit gfx options but hey ho

 

[Grobut]

i had heard this also...not only was it to keep filesize down but like the crysis beta they don't want people to see the eye popping glory of uber gfx until the release...whether you beleive it or not is another story it seems odd to me that a company trying to sell their engine as much as their game would limit gfx options but hey ho

Well you have to figure, who will download a Demo weighing in just under 800 megs? quite alot! and who would download a demo weighing in at 3 gigs.. definately not as many, thats just torture unless you have a very fat line and a subscription to a good download service.

As for them "not wanting people to see the full glory of the GFX", that has to be an urban legend, it makes perfect sense to make your Demo small and therefor avalible to more people, but making it intentionally look bad for the sake for making it look bad? how's that going to sell copies? i really doubt that was ever a considderation.


UT3 is capable producing the same graphics as Bioshock, but with even bigger textures and higher poly models (Bioshock was made for console first and foremost, and the textures where not made bigger for the PC release, and PC's are scalable unlike consoles, so models can also be higher poly), and thus, it should easilly be capable of looking as good as the screenies we've seen of the full version, and Epic has never faked thouse in the past (unlike others, *cough*CoDseries*Cough*).

 

[Aeneas2020]

Well you have to figure, who will download a Demo weighing in just under 800 megs? quite alot! and who would download a demo weighing in at 3 gigs.. definately not as many, thats just torture unless you have a very fat line and a subscription to a good download service.

As for them "not wanting people to see the full glory of the GFX", that has to be an urban legend, it makes perfect sense to make your Demo small and therefor avalible to more people, but making it intentionally look bad for the sake for making it look bad? how's that going to sell copies? i really doubt that was ever a considderation.


UT3 is capable producing the same graphics as Bioshock, but with even bigger textures and higher poly models (Bioshock was made for console first and foremost, and the textures where not made bigger for the PC release, and PC's are scalable unlike consoles, so models can also be higher poly), and thus, it should easilly be capable of looking as good as the screenies we've seen of the full version, and Epic has never faked thouse in the past (unlike others, *cough*CoDseries*Cough*).

its not an ubran legend its exactly what crytek is doing with crysis...just to point something else out UT3 is also being developed for consoles...but yes i am very aware of what the UE3.0 engine is capable of i understand what ur saying about dload size which i completely agree with was simply suggesting a secondary reason (especially considering that a lot of the graphical options are disabled in the demo)

 

[Grobut]

its not an ubran legend its exactly what crytek is doing with crysis...just to point something else out UT3 is also being developed for consoles...but yes i am very aware of what the UE3.0 engine is capable of i understand what ur saying about dload size which i completely agree with was simply suggesting a secondary reason (especially considering that a lot of the graphical options are disabled in the demo)

Crysis might have done it that way for whatever reason, but i just dont think that is the case here, it think its all about download size.

And you might know what the engine can do, but a disturbing number of people here seem to think UT3 wont look any better than the demo, and im trying to hammer it into their thick skulls that the demo is a castrated version of the full game! but im starting to think some of them have an axe to grind for some reason and just plain want to moan about it..

And yes, i know UT3 will also be on console, but everything points to it beeing developed PC first, then console, not the other way around like Bioshock was.
That has also been tradition with the Unreal series, there's been a couple of console versions, but they where sepperate productions, the PC version never suffered because of them.

 

[Aeneas2020]

yeh i completely agree with u on all that mate...however i know this version of UT is being developed for both console and pc at the same time as the same product so there have been a few small sacrifices, anyway i think we are arguing over points we agree on lol

 

[Grobut]

anyway i think we are arguing over points we agree on lol

No you are! Grrrr!

But you do have a point..

 

[Zips]

I couldn't get it to work, even with the Bioshock.exe trick with my Vista system. I didn't try too hard though, so -shrugs-

Though it will have its own profile soon according to the UT3 forums.

 

[BlitzForce]

HDR is a blurry mess in this game!

 

[Monkwarrior]

Somehow the screens are not very impressive.
You mean they were even worse before you applied AA ?

Monk.

 

[Xendance]

HDR is a blurry mess in this game!

The depth of field effect is up to the mapper. I think it's there to simulate the foggy/misty mountains.

 

[spraduke]

Yeah the other map (cant remember the name) doesn't have so much blur on so thats fine and suspense (vctf) isn't blurry either.

The first of the screenshots doesn't have AA on the second has 4x AA. Ingame it looks a lot smoother with the AA on and it was very much welcome but the blur is seriously overdone in shangrila. I hope that the demo does indeed have cut down textures and the full version is better. Ill be buying it just to get my hands on unreal ed 3 .