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Originally posted by nwlinkvxd
Why is it that all the screenshots are never anti-aliased.
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Well, the HardOCP article discusses the issue of AA very closely, and notes that, in most areas of the game, AA is unnecessary, as it brings little enhancement of visual effects to the game. Most surfaces are rendered so damn well that AA is useless, or since a good portion of the game (at least what they played) is in the dark, or around dark areas.
From hardOCP:
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I'm sure you noticed the lack of antialiasing, or AA, in many of our gameplay tests. In our testing, AA was only enabled after receiving solid framerates at 1600x1200. We don’t have an issue with AA, it's just that it's a much less relevant factor in the DOOM 3 experience when compared with other games. DOOM 3’s environments are mostly indoors and are often darkly lit. Such settings have a tendency to conceal many of the aliased edges that have a lot of contrast with the background. DOOM 3 really gives you a sense of running at a higher resolution than it really is. 640x480 resolution just doesn't look the way you would expect it to when compared with past gaming experiences. We've talked to engineers and DOOM 3 playtesters and both have made the same observation.
Our experience playing DOOM 3 kept getting better as the resolution increased. We found that in almost every case where we disabled AA, we could move up one setting in resolution. For instance, we found 1024x768 with no antialiasing to be a better experience than 800x600 with 2X antialiasing. Your experience may vary, but AA wasn't much of a factor in our DOOM 3 experience. Once you break the 1024x768 resolution barrier, you'll likely never be distracted by an aliased edge unless you're actually looking for one.
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Hope that answered your question. The real issue here is that 1) there not a machine that can really play this game at "Ultra Quality" settings, and 2) there's not really a noticeable difference when you do have it turned on. Not unless you've got that almost non-existant Tumwater-based system, what with 2 PCI-X16 slots for VGA, running 2 3.6+ Intel Xeons, and 2 fucking Geforce 6800 Ultra PEs OC'ed. And that requires some serious, serious cash. And some really good (read: water-based, or Prometia-based) cooling. Can't forget the RAM either, if you're gonna run Doom 3 at what's called "Ultra Quality" with some serious AA, then you probably need some DDR2-500 or DDR2-667. I don't even think those modules are available either. You might also want a RAID setup with a pair of 74 GB Raptors. In other words, AA at a high-ass resolution, where you're trying to run the game at their best framerates (consistent 60 FPS), then it's gonna be just about impossible (unless you have about $3,000 to flush
).