Originally posted by: DaveBaumann
Originally posted by: Wingznut
Thanks for the link, NFS4...
I'm certainly no programmer, but I don't understand why Valve would not develop HL2 so that FSAA could be implemented on current hardware. Maybe it's a trade-off for some other feature???
FSAA is not really a feature developers are interested in at the moment. Because the board manufacturers have the control panel options to do it developers don't investigate it for their game as they probably believe its just something the users will do afterwards. Unfortunatly due to the nature of Force Multisampling and DX it has caused some issues (this and Splinter Cell), but because developers don't really look at it they get so far down a particular development path that they can't really back out when they get round to experimenting with it.
The other issue is that a new title like this, running with all the DX9 options, may require such a large resource on even the highest end modern boards that they think using FSAA would suck up even more performance - however, the point with Multisampling is that of the title is Shader limited in the first place FSAA shouldn't have the same performance hit as it would in non-shader titles.
WRT this issue, Valve have stated that technically the 9500-9800 hardware has the abilities to utilise AA but this is not currently exposed through DX9.0; it could be done with PS3.0 but thats not enabled you and R300 doesn't have full PS3 hardware so effectively ATI would have to circumvent part of DX to enable it and they may not want to for fear of annoying MS. Basically if you want it, lobby ATI (and potentially MS and Valve) so that they find a method of enabling it. It sounds as though this would be very difficult to achieve on GeForce FX hardware as, from what Valve say, GeForce FX doesn't contain this exact bit of hardware capability (and they'd have to do some other complicated workarounds in order for it to work).