Anisotropic Filtering: Turning it on

[Rockermonkey]

For some reason the smart ones at EA have Anisotropic Filtering turned off by default, this will show you how to turn it on. And I'll tell you all what it does in a minute  .

Just to be clear with you all, I'm reposting this here. This was originally made by a person from Gamespot, then was brought to my attention from Tictic on Flickr. So I'm not trying to steal anything, just thought I'd be helpful seeing as it doesn't appear anyone here knows about it, as I haven't heard any talk of it.
Now, what it does. It improves textures like ground textures when they are further away from the camera. In my game I would notice while driving on the road that as I'm driving the white lines would slowly become unblurred, making for terrible looking roads as it was very noticeable. Also the grass only a few feet away but still on camera would be completely blurred out, also everything seemed to have a look of unsharp, but when changing these settings things seemed to be a bit sharper. What caused this I have no clue. So overall what this mainly will do and where it's most noticeable, is when your seeing things like the ground and trees and even sims will all appear sharper from further away. I found this was helpful, mainly because even with my old graphic card at x8 had no lag even when changing the settings.

Now, here's the annoying part. I only have an Nvidia card, so if you guys could try this on your ATI cards I'd add the instructions here. As it is right now, I only have these for Nvidia. So I have no possible way of knowing for sure that it will be the same way with ATI. I'd appreciate it if someone could test it out for us .

Now without further ado, the instructions :].

-Right click on your desktop
-Go to nVidia Control Panel
-Go to Advanced Settings
-Go to Left Panel then to Manage 3D Settings
-You will see on the right panel the tabs: Global and Program settings
-Click the Tab Program Settings
-Select a Program to Customize --- Add TS3
(you'll find two - TS3 and S3 launcher Choose TS3.exe not the launcher). Program files -- Electronic Arts -- The Sims 3 -- Game -- Bin
-Anisotropic Filtering is on the first option and you will see initially that it is Application Controlled. This is the part you have to change.
-Change it to whatever you think your card can handle.
-Apply.

By the way you can find the .exe from add then go to the programs directory and such, you guys probably all know this and find the executable that is called TS3.



EDIT: Just thought I'd post here to let you people that already have overheating and crashing problems to not even bother with this. While it made a difference for me, this won't help your crashing game. It could only make it worse, and more frequent to crashes. I've never crashed myself, and I haven't crashed since. So for those people who haven't crashed or don't crash very often, or if it isn't related to a hardware problem, I don't see why you can't try it and see if you see a difference. There may not be a difference that is significant enough for you, and you can easily turn it off again by going back to your graphic card options and disabling it.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

As far as I know, you just go to Anisotropic Filtering under 3D in Advanced View in CCC and set it to whatever you think you can handle (mine is at 16X).  ATI doesn't seem to have the same Global and Program settings as my old FX5600 did.

My biggest wish is that I could actually use adaptive anti-aliasing with this game instead of it causing shit to look like...well, pixelated boxy shit.

[Ryslin]

Generally ATI's default in overriding game settings, vs Nvidia seeming to allow program defaults at first (if not set up differently)

I wonder.. how many ATI card folks have catalyst AI on , and what the effect is? I default to having it off unless told to turn it on.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Mine's been set to standard ever since I started playing the 'arred version, and I haven't noticed anything spectacular (of course, I'm still trying to see a difference between this 3200HD and the X1550 I had in my old machine; not much difference, graphically speaking).  I've upped it to the advanced setting just to see what it does.  I'll report back unless this machine goes up in flames.

[Rockermonkey]

By the way guys, this is my source. She also posted a comparison, so you can see what it does and what difference it makes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tictic/3628160485/

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Just tested on advanced Catalyst AI settings and haven't noticed any difference yet after playing for a little bit. 

Also, it should be noted that people should be a little careful using the higher settings on systems that can't handle it.  Considering that the damn game already causes many people's machines to overheat because the CPU temp jumps something like 20 fucking degrees when playing, just imagine the amount of pissy folks adjusting their settings for shinier graphics and then getting toasted motherboards.

[Ashkitty]

Am I the only one who immediately went to go fiddle with all this crap after, like, the first three minutes of being in game? Tweeeeak tweak tweak...

[Drakron]

I forgot about Anisotropic Filtering.

Actually the game seems to apply on some settings it since there is this line:

option TextureQuality
  setting $High
   prop $ConfigGroup AnisoEnabled  true

But I guess since there is no slider to control it, it just applies the x2 setting if it actually applies anything at all ... using the program override does give us control over the Anisotropic Filtering settings.

The games does allow control over the Anti-aliasing setting in the EdgeSmoothing slider, the choices are off, x2, x4 and x8

[J. M. Pescado]

Those screenshots all look the same to me. Maybe if the subgenius who took them had made them bigger and not used shitty JPEG to destroy any possible quality in them, it'd be possible to tell the difference.

[crunk]

The only thing I got from those pictures is that the 9800 card isn't worth the $150 tag it comes with.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

The biggest difference is the ground.  That's about all anisotropic filtering does for you in the game -- the ground looks more detailed and less blurry.  Whoopee.  And as with all things Sims-related, if you don't have that great of a system to handle it, upping your settings just slows down your game until your mouse is dragging ass across the screen.

[Rockermonkey]

Well ingame there certainly is a difference, just thought I'd let you all know since the whole blurry ground/blurry roads were killing me. I'll go in game later and get some pictures of the game without it and with it. For some reason once I turned it on, the beach ground textures finally came in for me. Before, they were plain old green paint and plain old tan. Now they both have real textures. (The green 'paint' is now grass, and the tan is now grains of sand). I'm not too sure if this will take affect on everyones computer as it has on mine, since my graphic card is a piece of crap that can take a huge beating and still be relatively fine. Setting it up to 8x gave me this result:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3331/3635258398_af3f18f2a2_o.jpg
If your game already looks like that, I'm not sure what else you'll really get from it. But then again, if I turn advanced rendering on my game becomes a laggy disaster, so my game may look like that on 8x and someone elses may look thousand times better on that setting then mine. My Nvidia 6150 fails at life, I hate retailers that sell good computers with crappy cards...

[beear]

No advanced rendering sucks eh =(
Thanks for the tip though, off to turn AF on =)

[Kralore]

It looks like Sims 3 applies no Anisotropic Filtering (AF) at all.  I'm posting 4 screenshots that probably do the best job of showing AF at work.  Starting with Application Managed (ATI)/Application Controlled (Nvidia), then 2x AF, 4x AF and 8x AF.  What your looking at is the 2 yellow lines down the center of the road.  There is a borderline where the textures on the side closest to you are sharp and the textures on the far side of the borderline become blurry.  You can see the 2 yellow lines blur into 1 line on the far side.  As you increase AF, the borderline gets "pushed" further away.  With no AF the border is just past the curve in the road. At 2x the border is across the first driveways on the left and right. At 4x its at about the Yield sign on the right. At 8x its way off in the distance. I can't really see needing to go 16x AF.

[Leticron]

Even with my shitty suboptimal onboard chip 6150SE I can see significant improvement at AF 2x.
@TS: Thanks for the info...I wouldn't have checked the nVidea-settings on my own  

-le

[Rockermonkey]

*high fives Leticron* That's my card XD. By the way, with good memory/CPU and such you should be able to put almost every on the highest except for Advanced rendering and shadows. Also I have it on 8x, so unless my cards just magical, I think you should be able to crank it up to there. I only have 2 gigs on Vista, so it's not my computer is that almighty and I get no lag on pretty high settings for the card that's apparently not even supposed to run it...EA should really update their card list, because it's a dumb one.

[Alex]

I set it to 16x and noticed very little difference (it was there, but it wasn't much). The roads still look like shit in Edit Town.

[Leticron]

@Rockermonkey: Yep, that's what I have here 32-Bit Vista with 2GB and said onboard chip.
I didn't want to crank it up all the way right from the start, since I just (hopefully) recovered from a nasty nvlddmkm.sys error.
I installed the latest detonator and haven't have a crash since (knock on wood).
I might crank it up in a few days but I don't expect too much more improvement.
Let's face it GFX in TS3 compared to TS2 are just crappy.
As for the chip not beeing on the list....conspiracy theory or not I suspect EA leaving that out on purpose
That way, a lot of people with low end cards go out and jumpstart the market.
But if you test any arred version first (and buy only the games which deserve it), you'll just know when it's time to buy better hardware.


-le

[GnatGoSplat]

I set mine to 8x and there was a significant improvement in grass/street detail.  It may have degraded performance a little bit, it's hard to tell.

Leticron, I don't think you can judge the graphics in Sims 3 if you're just using a 6150SE.  Not only is that onboard video, it's crappy and ancient onboard video at that.
Graphics in Sims 3 is actually much better, just the lighting is weird and makes sims doughey and creepy, but other than that, everything else looks much better.

[Rockermonkey]

I set mine to 8x and there was a significant improvement in grass/street detail.  It may have degraded performance a little bit, it's hard to tell.

Leticron, I don't think you can judge the graphics in Sims 3 if you're just using a 6150SE.  Not only is that onboard video, it's crappy and ancient onboard video at that.
Graphics in Sims 3 is actually much better, just the lighting is weird and makes sims doughey and creepy, but other than that, everything else looks much better.

Heyyy, I have a 6150SE and it's awesome XD. The only thing that kills my game is advanced rendering . Even then it's playable.

[Erry]

I have a Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS and honestly, before Anisotropic Filtering, MY GAME WOULD LAG(On med and some high settings), now, and I do not know why, it runs like butter. O_O And it's 'default' setting is 8x.

[Leticron]

@GnatGoSplat: If you compare 2 pictures IMHO it doesn't matter if you do that on a cheap graphics system or on an expensive one.
It's not about absolute numbers...much more about the subjective impression you get while comparing these 2 pictures.

And I'm sorry....but TS2 looks so much better (even on my shitty cheap onboard chip  ) (or do you think it is BECAUSE of my shitty cheap onboard chip ?)
If you seriously don't see that, with your expensive un-ancient and un-crappy card then dear sir you might have been cheated and lied to by your hardware supplier  

-le

[Rockermonkey]

I think that sims 3 looks far better. Have you updated recently? I can't see why mine would look way better then sims 2 and yours would look worse. Your not playing on the highest settings(Without Adanced rendering) right? Because I thought that the textures were terrible until I changed to almost full settings.
Really, the only thing that changes between cards are speed. As long the card is good enough to run on full settings you can't blame anything on the card. Your un-ancient newer card probably also has game crashes just like everyone else with better cards then me. This makes me chuckle and say "Even with my old as all heck graphic card I have not had one crash and have no lag. On almost full settings."
I don't know why the game runs like it does on my computer...But it does, and it runs really nice.

[Leticron]

Well...perhaps it is time for me to get glasses (or at least clean the monitor  )
I believe I have comparable settings in both games.
IMHO TS2 has clearly the cleaner graphics but that's nothing to get all warped up about.
Just look at it like a personal opinion (and you know, what "they" say about opinions

I'm off now checking if for some reason TS3 hasnn't been kicked to the fullest of my GFX capabilities.
Have a nice weekend

-le

[GnatGoSplat]

@GnatGoSplat: If you compare 2 pictures IMHO it doesn't matter if you do that on a cheap graphics system or on an expensive one.
It's not about absolute numbers...much more about the subjective impression you get while comparing these 2 pictures.

And I'm sorry....but TS2 looks so much better (even on my shitty cheap onboard chip  ) (or do you think it is BECAUSE of my shitty cheap onboard chip ?)
If you seriously don't see that, with your expensive un-ancient and un-crappy card then dear sir you might have been cheated and lied to by your hardware supplier  

I think it does matter.  With a shitty old onboard chip, you can't turn all settings max, turn smooth edges to max, and crank resolution up to monitor's native.  Running anything less than native resolution = blurry.
With all settings maxed, Sims 3 looks better other than the pudding faces.

I had to turn anisotropic off on mine though.  I had 2 unexplained BSOD's in 2 days while playing Sims 3 with it turned on, and this machine has NEVER crashed playing Sims 3 for the past month.  It seems like it can't be a coincidence.  It's probably due to my video card being one of those fairly uncommon single-slot versions.  I may try it again when I upgrade to a better card with dual slot cooler.