No technical issues so far. However, it seems like AA is not active in garage view.

Comparison pit vs track: http://s7.postimg.org/ybevssgrv/Image3.jpg

Quote from chucknorris :

No technical issues so far. However, it seems like AA is not active in garage view.

Comparison pit vs track: http://s7.postimg.org/ybevssgrv/Image3.jpg

I quoted Scawen with an explanation in this post.

0.6E13 made it marginally better. But now i think i was to hasty to make assumptions as to why it happens, possibly side-tracking you little bit.
By moving the Mip bias sliders around (in E13) I got it to look similar to DX8 version. Sorry for not thinking of that before!

Story does not end there though
As it appears I'm only one affected with this problem I wouldn't want to ask you to hassle with that issue. Especially considering my rare hardware/driver combo for a rare laptop. The only problem I will ever have with it will be along the lines: does -1.1 mip bias make the text appear sharpest or is it maybe -1.0, but yesterday -1.2 was the sharpest... So yeah, no biggie

If you wish to tackle it anyway I'll provide feedbacks. Who knows if anyone else will be affected and how it will manifest itself when patch goes live. This time, just 7 screenshoots showing relation between AF and Mip bias (for text only, others i'll explain in words) in DX8 - 0.6E and DX9 - 0.6E13, without assumptions from my side. First three are dx8, next four dx9. Last four also confirm a bug previously mentioned: Prt Sc command outputs a black image, unless at least some AA is applied (tested in-game and full screen, all the driver settings set to app pref). The last four have all 2x AA applied for that reason.

First 3: classic DX8, behaving as I used to

2nd image shows how text mip bias affects the menu sharpness in contrast to 1st image, moving bottom sliders to the left brings the image to look closer to the 3rd one

3rd image is most interesting because it gives me best quality and the AF setting of 16 overrides all the mip bias sliders - changing them does not affect a single pixel

Last 4: new DX9

4th & 5th behave same as 1st & 2nd

6th i would expect to give best quality and is the reason for my first and this report

7th shows that bottom sliders (all of them) now override the AF setting, opposite as before but provide sufficient tweaking options

In a nutshell I would like best if 6th looked like 3rd
Performance and logic wise it looks to me that it would be better to provide less demanding base to improve (0 AF with mip bias) then to improve more demanding base with more recourse costing improvements (16 AF with mip bias).

I hope i made sense explaining so much, and not made it to difficult to read and digest.

@ Nilex: you seem to have the same error that I had, on your DX9 pics all the trees and parts of the banner bridge are missing. Do you have "Adaptive Anti Aliasing" enabled as well?

Indeed i have, it's labeled as "Adaptive Multi-sample AA". That, and another setting called Catalyst A.I. both do not have any options to make them application preference. Both appear to be working non-stop without any option to turn them off from within the AMD catalyst. For that reason I disabled whole AMD (AMD External Events Utility) from win7 startup in msconfig, only bare drivers are left. Even after that I am still not entirely sure if it's shut off completely . All this was done before E12 test, not E13 becuase there doesn't seem to be a reason for that.
Supposedly driver AA turns ON only after it's enabled by the game as well, and driver just tells it which method of AA to use.
Two reasons why it's hard to believe for me it might be that:
- rest of the image isn't AA'd, be it LFS or any other game
- picture remains the same even after i switch between different AA methods (again, in driver settings only), other two are "Multi-sample AA" and "Super-sample AA".
Needless to say AA is turned off in-game all the time, i can't stand AA anywhere
Thanks for the heads up though!

Quote from Scawen :

P.S. I noticed the frame limitation in a window as well, seems limited to desktop frame rate. When I used a debug version with a lot of AI cars, it was limited to 30 instead. So somehow it does work like vertical sync, and it's not related to Aero because my computer is XP.

If I remember correctly, that's because once you no longer are running the application in full screen mode, the driver will force V-Sync to save power. So when your just sitting at desktop, not doing anything, it's not rendering at 10,000 FPS, using needless power. I asked John Carmack on twitter, because I don't know the twitter handles of nVidia or AMD GPU reps, so I'm hoping for a reply to confirm.

[EDIT] Wow, Carmack is quick this was his reply:

Quote from @ID_AA_Carmack :

@Dygear @scawen1 if you have a desktop composting mode active, the driver often can't override the sync behavior in a window.

So the answer is, it depends.

Quote from Bigbob1993 :

Yes please! This could be made as an option in menu. I would give up my 2XAA to have this and still run the game smoothly on my PC
However, it is up to you, what will you spend your time on... this is just my little wish

That would be pretty awesome. Having the setting "Tire Smoke Behind Fence (Costly)" [Yes / No] Would be a nice touch, let us decide if we want it, or you can just force it as everyone is getting free FPS from the DX9 patch anyway, so we might as well get some visual fixes to offset it anyway. I think we can burn a 15.98% FPS improvement to fix a visual bug.

0.6E (DX8)

0.6E13 (DX9)

Quote from Nilex :

By moving the Mip bias sliders around (in E13) I got it to look similar to DX8 version. Sorry for not thinking of that before!

I'll think about the mip bias settings in conjunction with anisotropic filtering. I'm not certain if it is working correctly or not.

Quote from ACCAkut :

@ Nilex: you seem to have the same error that I had, on your DX9 pics all the trees and parts of the banner bridge are missing. Do you have "Adaptive Anti Aliasing" enabled as well?

This is what I'm more concerned about at the moment. It seems, from my initial searching, that the purpose of Adaptive Antialiasing is to take care of Alpha Test textures. Well... that's one way to take care of them I suppose... don't draw them at all! Not very innovative though...

Quote from Nilex :

Needless to say AA is turned off in-game all the time, i can't stand AA anywhere
Thanks for the heads up though!

But it is switched on in all your DX9 screenshots, making some of the scenery disappear.

WOW!! Huge improvement here on my i5 HD 3000, loving it!

2014-01-22 23:55:22 - LFS
Frames: 4788 - Time: 108452ms - Avg: 44.148 - Min: 36 - Max: 51

2014-01-22 23:59:18 - LFS_6E13
Frames: 7122 - Time: 108561ms - Avg: 65.603 - Min: 55 - Max: 76

i compared frame rates on my P4 3.0ghz HD2600pro and i have no increase nor decrease of the FPS, i have 26-32 fps on full 32 cars grid and after the first lap got 45-70 fps

same framerate as 0.6E

Quote from Nilex :

Indeed i have, it's labeled as "Adaptive Multi-sample AA". That, and another setting called Catalyst A.I. both do not have any options to make them application preference.

is your version of the driver up-to-date? Because I can create profiles for .exe files if I wanted to, and I don't have a "Catalyst-A.I" option anywhere anymore.

If I do this search on google :

"Adaptive Multi-sample AA" disappearing objects

I see that this problem or something like it seems to come up in various programs. The solution is not to switch on "Adaptive Multi-sample AA" and just use normal Multi-sample AA instead.

I don't know yet if there's a way I can change something in LFS to allow the alpha test textures to be visible even in the Adaptive mode. As I said before, it's quite strange and I'm guessing it's a bug in the AMD drivers.

Oh, I didn't even notice something was missing from AA screens. The reason I have put AA on was because the Prt Sc outputted black screen if i took it without AA, and in doing it with AA enabled i also forgot about driver AA setting . And the reason for using Prt Sc in the first place was it was more convenient then built-in Ctrl+S because of no need for folder navigation to get to the .bmp
Basically, my main focus was so strong on the loss of image sharpness in DX9, using same settings as DX8, that i tunnel visioned everything else... sorry

The scenery loss does not bother or affect me as I don't use AA and, as ACCAkut tells us, people with newer drivers can disable adaptive AA and continue to use AA in-game normally. I can't do that because drivers are locked to my laptop manufacturer and it does not update them, making my scenery problem pretty unique and defiantly not worth solving. Actually there is no problem so to say, not on LFS's side as i see it. Since it won't affect me, it's all good?
By the way, using all three AA methods i mentioned earlier make parts of scenery disappear, if that matters. EDIT: This is incorrect! Multi-sample and Super-sample AA work without problems, I had to restart LFS to notice that.

Only thing that remains then is less sharp screen on DX9, most notably the menus and any text of the screen. Taken another screen to show what i mean, this time without AA, using ctrl+s. Added old one as well for comparison. It can be remedied using Mip bias settings though so it's not that big of a deal but it does work different than before, which I don't know if it is intentional or not. More detailed about that in my previous post, but ignore the scenery

Thanks for helping me in this peculiar issue and sorry for the confusion i caused
Excuse the delay for the reply too, I couldn't use the PC before due to damn headacke.

I can confirm this, MSAA is OK, Adaptive MSAA causes objects to be invisible, SSAA is OK. Check the pictures. Used the same track as Nilex. My driver packaging version: 9.002-120928m-149042C-ATI, catalyst version: 12.10, Direct3D driver version: 9.14.10.0926.

Same in Iracing apparently.
Seems like a really old bug and I have no idea why AMD hasn't fixed it. Maybe there is a genuine reason...
http://faq.iracing.com/article.php?id=114

I know the option can be switched off but that's not good for new users who innocently choose the middle option in their graphics drivers then months later install LFS and think, "what a crap game with no trees and floating banners".

One thing you could do is to let the users know that it is a known bug and recommend switching back to the Multi-sampling or Supersampling option. Maybe show a short text next to the Antialiasing line, or include a more descriptive text under a '?' button? Not an ideal solution but if there's not an alternative...

LFS 0.6E13 AA (in Game) not work in Garage.

LFS 0.6E Works OK

Regards

Many people still complain because of lack of AA in lobby, ... just wondering, possible to render that scenes as 3D (like tracks, ...) and enable AA that way?

Quote from DANIEL-CRO :

Many people still complain because of lack of AA in lobby, ... just wondering, possible to render that scenes as 3D (like tracks, ...) and enable AA that way?

That's how it was in the past but it became impossible with the restructuring for the 3D support.

I have to try something. It seems there is a way to create AA textures from a rendered image, with a performance hit (that doesn't matter in setup screens). You have to render to a separate surface that is not a texture, then copy to the texture afterwards. For some reason, antialiasing is only allowed on render target surfaces that are not textures, but these can be copied to a texture using StretchRect.

[NOT DX9 OR OCULUS RIFT RELATED]
There is a bug in Ai's path, they go in the sidewall, see my video. SO1 Classic, probably this one can be fixed easily. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3grpGMnKLA

Quote from MandulAA :

[NOT DX9 OR OCULUS RIFT RELATED]
There is a bug in Ai's path, they go in the sidewall, see my video. SO1 Classic, probably this one can be fixed easily. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3grpGMnKLA

This is a old bug. I see this a long time in older versions of lfs too.

Regarding the Adaptive AA;
I can't reproduce the bug on my system, although mine only calls it "Adaptive Anti-Aliasing" not "Adaptive Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing", which might have some bearing on it. It does have two quality settings though.

Radeon HD4890; Driver Package 8.97.100.7-121116a-151639C-ATI; Catalyst 13.1 (legacy, latest version for the card); D3D Version 7.12.10.0911



This may be a reason the bug hasn't been fixed. If DX10 doesn't even support the alpha test method, it may be that it is now more common (perhaps even in DX9) to do the same thing with pixel shader trickery. If that's the case, I would guess a shader method would have much better performance, considering how fast shaders are on modern GPUs.
Pure wild speculation on my part though.

I tested the DX8 vs. DX9 version on my old PC rig the other day:

Quote from Old PC, DX8 :

Frames: 9620 - Time: 108156ms - Avg: 88.946 - Min: 51 - Max: 132

Quote from Old PC, DX9 :

Frames: 6933 - Time: 108545ms - Avg: 63.872 - Min: 47 - Max: 90

As you can see, I experienced a pretty drastic decrease in performance using the DX9 patch. However, I finished building my new rig today and decided to test it out as well. Here are the results:

Quote from New rig, DX8 :

Frames: 20635 - Time: 108249ms - Avg: 190.625 - Min: 113 - Max: 267

Quote from New rig, DX9 :

Frames: 24884 - Time: 108265ms - Avg: 229.843 - Min: 139 - Max: 299

In this case it was the exact opposite. A pretty handy increase now with the new system.

0.6E (DX8)

0.6E13 (DX9)

AMD Radeon HD6870 with latest beta drivers
Phenom II X4 955BE
8gb DDR3
Basic HDD
Win7 x64

I did a 2min test in Blackwood with 12 AI FBM. All graphic settings maxed out. 1920x1080 resolution.

If i use this to race with will i still be able to race with others online and set clean laps on AIRIO?

Yes, this patch is 100% compatible with 0.6E