Valve Defuses NVidia Half-Life 2 Issues

suineg writes "Gabe Newell, Valve's main man, has commented on Half-Life 2 and anti-aliasing problems with DX9 cards over at HalfLife2.net: '[The current problems] ...will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a polygon. This is not a new problem. Artifacts may show up more frequently in Half-Life 2 simply because we've eliminated lots of other artifacts, and because we have a lot of variation in scene lighting due to our art direction.'" As far as solutions go, Newell has some: "ATI has supported... [the centroid work-around] form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series... [as for] NVIDIA's [hardware], that doesn't support centroid sampling... you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates."

Comments

Re:Trade-offs

[samael]

Nope, it means that things that previously would have faded into the general 'unrealism' that pervades computer games stand out more and more when the other problems aren't there along with them.

Look at (for instance) Quake3. Point out a couple of problems with the graphics. Now look at Quake. The problems that FF has are almost certainly there too, but you won't notice them because other problems are far more glaring.