I was fooling with the settings the other day, and I'm assuming that LFS does not have a true AA setting. They have that texture bias thing instead. I'm guessing this was done for performance reasons, and I am all for it. I would assume, however, that if I set my Nvidia card to overwrite the game settings at like 2 or 4 x AA, it would probably look even nicer? I'm not even going to try because I run two 19" screens so I know my 6800GT wont be able to handle it smoothly. Runs perfectly now with all settings up all the way AND with the new high-res textures. However, since I upgraded those, putting more than 5 AI cars on the track causes framerate issues. So I know that forcing hardware AA would overwork it. Just wondering if this is the case or not?

Yup. And Anisotropic. (got to change em in windows)

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

I was fooling with the settings the other day, and I'm assuming that LFS does not have a true AA setting. They have that texture bias thing instead.

LFS does not have an AA setting at all. Also, there is no such thing as "Texture Bias." However, if you mean "Mip Bias", then that just forces different amounts of mip-mapping on the textures.

You can set up AA in the nvidia control panel under pforiles so it only overrides when LFS.exe is started. Yes it'll take a greater hit on your graphics card, btu you should be able to run some AA and AF with that card. I'd experiement, you migth be surprised and find that you're cpu limited and frame rate doesn't change too much with AA enabled.

Yes, the nVidia (and ATI) driver settings will force LFS to use AA and AF if you deselect application preference. It's hard to say whether your CPU or GPU can't keep up. Why don't you just run some tests?

Your computer will not explode. I think.

Yes, setting AA on the GPU settings will enable AA in LFS (no brainer really).
And I can recommend your try adding some AA, because LFS is more CPU intensive so AA might not have much effect on your FPS. I didn't notice much difference in performance when I had 6600GT. I used 1024x768 and everything maxed including AA and AF. The FPS was same, of course it did drop when lots of cars were on screen, but so it did without AA and AF too.

Even I run some AA because my framerate is more cpu limited in LFS so you should be fine to run some AA.

Ok ok, I'll give it a whirl. In the past, running a game on two monitors has meant turning most settings down. LFS is different because of how it is programmed, so I guess I'll try it out... if I can get Patch W working... it froze last time I went to race... and I had to restart my PC to get out of it.

But yea, I've got an AMD 4200+ X2 - so I'm assuming it wont be THAT CPU-limited... (yes I know LFS doesn't use both cores)

Actually, I just tried running Age of Mythology with the AA override setting - cause that doesn't have it either. After about 2 minutes, it froze, and I got the blue screen of death, physical memory dump, etc... so not a good first impression, lol. Ran fine tho up till then

Yup, im sure you should give it a go...i can race with a full grid with my 2400xp(@2266) and a 9700pro 1152*864 with 2*AA 8*AF Hi Res textures and skies all graphics settings up full and it still runs like shit off a shovel, no problem at all.

Ok, new issue. Anyone know why when I press 'Race' in the game... to, you know... go racing, it freezes? The only way out is to restart my PC. This is after having installed Patch W.

Go immediately report that to the Patch W thread! It might be because of Patch W or then something else is fukked up.

You are obviously having hardware issues. Try running memtest, prime95 and 3dmark for several hours each to find the problem. Depending which ones fail and which ones don't you can start guessing at which part is faulty.

About your original question: LFS doesn't have AA/AF settings but there is nothing wrong with using the driver settings to do this. LFS looks MUCH, MUCH better with AA/AF, in fact for me it's more or less unplayable without it as it strains my eyes. I doubt there will be a frame rate hit with your card.

It worked FINE until Patch W was installed. Its obviously a software problem... my PC runs fine. Unless Patch W fried my mobo, in which case it WOULD be a hardware problem, but it still would have been caused by a software problem :P

You mentioned two system freezes in two different games in this very thread. Computers that are working properly don't do that. Freezes and BSOD's are only very rarely caused by normal software applications. Usually the cause for these kind of errors are driver bugs, faulty hardware or overheating. When I had some problems with freezing a while ago it turned out to be faulty RAM which I found out using memtest. Haven't had any problems since.

Well, the LFS issue I know is a software problem since it is due to Patch W. As for the Ago of Mythology, worked fine until I used the AA setting for the graphics card. Other than that I have never had a single issue with the PC, so I'm just willing to bet that something just didn't work out that time.

Regardless, I KNOW that the LFS problem is a software problem, so I'd just like to get that fixed...

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

As for the Ago of Mythology, worked fine until I used the AA setting for the graphics card.

Maybe a driver related problem?

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

Regardless, I KNOW that the LFS problem is a software problem, so I'd just like to get that fixed...

I'm not saying you're wrong, but hardware faults can pop up in strange places. The recompilation of LFS for patch W might have resulted in code that tickles your computer just right, resulting in the freeze. I can't count how many overclockers I've seen come blasting in on game forums, complaining about the latest patch crashing their computer. It, of course, can't be their computer as it "works in everything else" but still, when they clock it down to stock speeds, everything's fine and dandy.

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but it would be a good idea to at least try some of the programs J.B. mentioned to see if it's your hardware. It'll probably save you a lot of future agony if you find problems.

Maybe when I have more time I'll do that. In the meantime I got it working by reinstalling V2. I'm gonna go ahead and go through the V-series until I encounter the problem again, and go from there.

In the meanwhile, I tried the AA. I didn't know that most of this game was CPU-intensive... all I can say is... WOW. I'm running 4xAA and 4x anisotropic filtering and still seem to be getting no less than 40-50 FPS! I had no idea. Looks FANTASTIC now

I have run 3DMark06 recently without issues recently... but I'll try that stuff when I have time.

AF usually has little affect on FPS - max it!

OK! What is AF anyway?

Silly question but I don't know how to find out myself. Does LFS run in OpenGL or DirectX9?

DirectX8

Well, I figured it out - and it was pretty stupid. I installed patch V5 to see if that would work, but the same thing happened. However, instead of pressing the reset button on my pc, I pressed the power button - having forgot that it was set to go into standby. So I pressed it again, and it came back up, with LFS minimized and a ZONEALARM window asking for permission for LFS to access the internet! Lol. Dunno why I couldn't minimize the window on my own tho...

Glad you fixed it! I love it when security programs cause problems that are more severe than the problems they are supposed to prevent. No firewall or Antivir here. No Problems.