Glorious 3D battles....not!

[Morindin]

Morindin you are talking about anti-aliasing(AA).
AA removes what people like to call "jaggies" which is straight lines of 3D objects not looking sharp and clear which is a side-effect of digitized graphics similar to how a line in MS paint can look segmented.

Frog is talking about anisotrophic filtering (AF).
AF usually works to remove flicker of textures (especially ones in the distance) and improves image quality by sharpening textures etc (probly other things I don't know about) AF can not be turned on in-game in RTW.

*doh* You're right. Skim reading is bad sometimes :P

[tombom]

I have a Radeon 9200 with 128mb, an Athlon 64 3000+ and 512mb of RAM. When I saw this, I found that setting it to highest detail made the game lag until I removed high quality shadows. Now it works fine.

[Dead Moroz]

Not to worry, for a solution is close at hand... our artists would also have complained at doing two sets of artwork ;) The 'imposters' in Rome (which is really just a fancy way of saying "a sprite which is pretending to be a 3d object") are all auto-generated from the 3d models. The auto-generator is built into the main Rome exe but is not exposed in the current build; I'll see if we can make it available in a patch. But be warned it does take a while to run.

Great! When this patch will be released?

[ToranagaSama]

Perhaps it is extra unpleasant for me, because I am modding new units and now the 3D models are not looking the same as the 2D sprites. And then the transition from 3D to 2D is very clear. So that means redrawing all the sprites. And I hoped that was no longer necessary after M:TW...

I am running AMD Athlon 2500 processor and a Radeon 9200 128 MB card with 512 MB of memory and it runs nicely on medium.

BTW, JFYI, the 9200 is a fairly low level card and is neither DX9 nor vertex shader 2.0 capable, this has a major effect upon the quaility of your graphics.

Here's an older comparison Chart, listing grahpic cards and their basic capbilities (listing the 9200):

VGA Charts III

Here's the latest updated Chart (the 9200 is no longer listed):

VGA Charts IV

Be aware that the amount of video memory on your card has little to no effect whatsoever, unless you have one of the very latest cards and use it with certain of the very latest games, and then the extra memory has only marginal effects. 128 is as good as 256. The card companies use 256 as hype to make more money from the uninitiated, Caveate Emptore (sp?). Though, 64 to 128 can be effective. In about a year or so 512 will be the standard and there s/b software to take advantage of it.

I've got a 9700 pro w. 128 megs and 1 gig of system memory. I play the game at 1600x1200x32, low AA, highest settings, no sprites visible.

[Ulstan]

"You have to enable it outside the game in your graphics card's control panel and it takes a bit of extra juice but it makes a huge difference."

Do you have to override letting the application pick the AF?

Or can you leave that checked, and select 4xAF, and RTW will go with the 4xaf?

[Suraknar]

Hello,

This is an Interesting Topic here.

I would not want to disagree with any of the Veterans of the Org here, specially not Duke John ;)

However, I think what you are observig, and I read all the posts in this thread to make sure that I am not repeating here, is actually LOD.

So that at different distances, the actual model changes to a simpler model, sometime very simpler model, like a rectangle face, containing 2 polys per.

I am thinking that this transition from a Higher LOD model to a lower LOD model is what is being observed here. I would have trouble immagining the amount of work of making two sets of graphics.

Just a thought.

[CrackedAxe]

The battles look awesome, no complaints here.

[frogbeastegg]

"You have to enable it outside the game in your graphics card's control panel and it takes a bit of extra juice but it makes a huge difference."

Do you have to override letting the application pick the AF?

Or can you leave that checked, and select 4xAF, and RTW will go with the 4xaf?

I'm not sure if the ATI drivers will default to the X4 if the program doesn't set its own preference; I have never got around to experimenting. I know my default in my card's settings was X0, so I had to alter it anyway. I just left it as an override for all programs, since I am not playing any other 3D games.

I wish this option was included in the in-game menu; it's a bit of an oversight.

[Tyrac]

I personally was shocked at how nice and smooth everything runs, even at higher settings. In alot of games to get the smooth play I want I turn everything to the min setting. Not this game! I am very impressed with that part of the game.