White outline around weapon & hand - 1st person view, certain AA levels - workarounds

[kabong 1]

I spent some time over the past two nights testing for ways to work around the antialiasing (AA) problem of white outlines around your weapon and hand in 1st person in certain AA levels (see pics below) and found a few things out (note, this may only apply to Nvidia-based systems because that's how both my systems here are built).

The problem occurs in only 3 AA levels - high, very high and 6.

workaround #1 - choose a different AA level

The problem only occurs when ambient occlusion is turned on in the Nvidia driver control panel.

workaround #2 - turn off ambient occlusion (make sure to do this in both the global settings AND the arma2.exe program settings within the driver control panel - the latter overrides the former)

How I tested:

ARMA 2 versions - 1.05 official, several 1.06 betas and 1.07 official

Driver versions - 197.45 WHQL and 257.21 WHQL

Behaviour was the same through all of these.

My systems:

#1 - i7 930 @ 2.8 GHz, Win7 64 bit, GeForce GTX 285, 6 GB ram

#2 - C2D E6850 @ 3.0 GHz, Win7 64 bit, GeForce GTX 275, 4 GB ram

Hope you find this helpful and that it works for you like it does for me. :)

p.s. As has been previously posted in the Beta Patch Testing forum by Suma, this is a limitation of DX9 and won't be fixed until the rendering engine is rewritten for DX10.1 (in other words, it's not happening until the next generation of the engine when they do ARMA 3 (or whatever they are going to call it)).

No white outline:

White outline:

Edited June 26, 2010 by KaBoNG
added pics

[jpinard 10]

Thanks! This is a really awesome post.

What you turn off Ambient Occlusion, what kind of visual quality loss do you see?

Also, what level AA are you using in the non-white outline screenshot?

[kabong 1]

Thanks! This is a really awesome post.

What you turn off Ambient Occlusion, what kind of visual quality loss do you see??

I didn't notice any change, but I'm not sure what to look for (i.e. I don't really know what Ambient Occlusion does to the image).

Also, what level AA are you using in the non-white outline screenshot

Can't remember exactly, but probably 5 or 7.

[Big Dawg KS 6]

I have Ambient Occlusion disabled and it does not get rid of this. Might be something more complicated...

[no use for a name 0]

You can also increase your 3D res past 100% and disable AA altogether. 125% gives ~2x AA (from what I can tell), and looks a little more 'crisp' IMO. I use 133% and see about the same performance impact as 4xAA, but without the lines. Obviously lower-end GPU's won't be able to do this w/o significant performance loss.

[jpinard 10]

You can also increase your 3D res past 100% and disable AA altogether. 125% gives ~2x AA (from what I can tell), and looks a little more 'crisp' IMO. I use 133% and see about the same performance impact as 4xAA, but without the lines. Obviously lower-end GPU's won't be able to do this w/o significant performance loss.

When I do that I see much worse performance. Maybe I'll have to re-bench or something but last I checked running 125% was the same as running the 7x FSAA option. Running 2x FSAA was much faster than 125%.

Are guys maxing out Anistroic Fitlering too? Maybe that's the discrepency, or PP level.