Anti-Alias & anisotropic filtering support

[Shadowboxer2005]

Could you add Anti-Alias & anisotropic filtering support so you can enable in the 2005 version?

[RinMaru]

you can already do that through your GPU

[michael-fadely]

Yep, the reason I opted out of implementing this is that AMD and NVidia's control panels can both provide higher quality MSAA than the standard MSAA that D3D would enable. Might be worth adding at least anisotropic filtering though--that's one thing that you can accidentally crank way up and not wreck performance.

[cheatfreak47]

It's worth noting that some older GPUs don't have drivers that allow enforced anti-aliasing, or in some cases where they do, they enforce it globally, so including an option to do it with direct3D might be worthwhile anyway.

Not that I even really like anti-aliasing personally, but I can definitely see use cases where having it added would be beneficial.

[michael-fadely]

I could do it with my below-spec GeForce FX 5200.

[PiKeyAr]

Bumping this since recently after switching to AMD RX6800 I found out there's no way to enable anti-aliasing in this game without hacks. The settings related to anti-aliasing in AMD Software do absolutely nothing with SADX but they do work with SA Tools. I was only able to turn on anti-aliasing by installing DXWrapper and forcing anti-aliasing in its settings. Anisotropic filtering can't be forced in the driver either if the D3D9On12 wrapper is installed.

I will implement support for setting anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in the loader. This will need to be exposed in SA Mod Manager as well.

[PiKeyAr]

Update: Anti-aliasing not forced through the AMD driver was caused by the Mod Loader setting D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY_VSYNC when VSync is enabled, while D3D9 apparently requires D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD for multisampling. Since D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY_VSYNC was removed in D3D9 anyway, I made it set D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD when the game is running in D3D9 mode. Forcing anti-aliasing through the driver now works correctly.

[PiKeyAr]

Update 2: Sora claims D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD causes stuttering so they removed the fix. Anti-aliasing is no longer possible again without turning off VSync. I'm not sure how D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY_VSYNC behaves in Direct3D 9 since MS docs sat it was removed, probably just switches over to D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY.

[PiKeyAr]

Update 3: Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering can now be configured in the loader JSON file. Example:

 "Graphics": {
    "Antialiasing": 16,
    "Anisotropic": 8,

Possible values:
Antialiasing: 0 (disabled), 2, 4, 8, 16.
Anisotropic: 0 (disabled) to 16.

Note that the antialiasing option is using D3D multisampling so it requires setting swap effect to D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD, which can cause stuttering. The swap effect is changed only if the value is other than the default 0.