I went from Catalyst 10.2 which forced AA on Oblivion with no problems to the latest 11.4 Catalyst and I couldn't force AA anymore. Using application settings for AA in Catalyst and disabling HDR and enabling AA with Oblivion itself didn't work.

Anyone else experience the same issue and if so any solutions to it?

I'm currently using those drivers and I'm having no issues with forced AA. Remember that, 1: not all drivers work the same for everyone, and 2: AMD drivers generally svck. Try rolling back to an earlier driver (remember to run driver sweeper first) and see if that helps.

Heh. Weird, because I'm seeing the opposite. Although I'm going to assume this is at least in part because I upgraded the card.

Up until the day before yesterday, I had an HD 4870. With that came an ugly line around the top and left edge of the screen. Annoying to say the least. After putting in the 6970 I also had to update to Catalyst 11.4 because the older drivers didn't recognize the new card. That annoying line is now gone.

I then realized upon getting into the game that the AA override from 11.2 (what I had before) on the 4870 was NOT working at all. The image quality on the 6970 with 11.4 was orders of magnitude better and I was able to confirm it's because the AA override is now working correctly.

The irritating line showed up somewhere around Catalyst 10.3. For a 4870 card, clearly I should not have been updating the driver as it was worthless to have done so.

I rolled back to Catalyst 10.2 and its forcing AA successfully just like before. I'm also getting that line at the top left you mention when AA is being forced on properly with 10.2. However, i'm almost certain that I saw that line when I was using 11.4 drivers as well; it just gave me no AA whatsoever

I did a little googling and noticed that some people have complained that 11.4 doesn't force AA in Oblivion and one person even mentioning that the entire AA settings bar in Catalyst is broken. But now two reports of people using 11.4 just fine with forcing AA.

Running a 5850 1 GB myself here.

You bought an HD6970? Why not just get the 6950 and shader mod it so that it runs like an HD6970? I've got two of those in CF and everything's looking great. It seems that the best driver for your card, Moe, would be either 10.2 or 10.3. Did you ever install 10.3 or you went straight to 10.4?

Oops sorry I actually rolled back from 11.4 to 10.12 (not 10.2) which made Forced AA work again. Its possible I might have had 10.2 (10.12 and 10.2 look similer to each other so I might be remembering wrong) before I tried the 11.4 drivers but I never had 10.3 or 10.4.

Edit:

Its possible that, from what Arthmoor is saying, that Forced AA on 11.x drivers might only with AMD 6xxx cards.

Yes, I did buy a 6970. I don't even know what this "shader mod" is you're referring to. Looking at some listings for 6950 I'm satisfied anyway because this one is a 940Mhz clock and I see nothing in the 6950 line that approaches that.

I'm not a big fan of the idea of doing hacks anyway and whatever shader mod you're talking about doesn't sound like something I'd want to risk doing.

EDIT: Oh yeah. No way I'd go down that sort of road with BIOS flashing a card with something meant for a higher model. There's a reason why reject high end stuff becomes the hardware in the next level down. It couldn't handle what was being asked of it to begin with.

Also, no way I'd knowingly void my warranty on something like this, and I don't advise anyone else do that either. It also appears to be strongly tied to a need to raise power input to the card and the 6950 does not have the correct power inputs for the voltages this would require. I'm also not a fan of aftermarket overclocks. Things are hot enough in my PC as it is without me making them worse on hardware that can't actually handle it anyway.



Well that's my experience, but I'm one person. Forced AA simply wasn't working, but it appears to have broken sometime back around 10.3, because it's plainly obvious to me after getting the new card and driver in place that it's working in Oblivion NOW. Also in Fallout 3. AA override has never worked for me there, but it clearly is now.

Sorry for being off topic, but I felt that it must be explained. The HD6950 and the HD6970 are the same, structurally. The extra pinouts on the HD6970 are both Ground leads and you can even run an HD6970 with two 6 pin connectors, they're not essential. The thing is that many companies create a "master" version, then laser-cut our cores, shaders, etc. from that version to provide the low tier versions. AMD failed to do this with the HD6950 (the shaders were supposed to be laser cut/permanently disabled, but the process was skipped), and as such sold an HD6970 with a 6950 bios.

If you have a reference model card you do NOT flash to an HD6970 bios, as it increases the memory voltages beyond what is necessary. You simply intall a modified HD6950 bios that is identical to the normal HD6950 bios, except that the shaders are unlocked. If the process fails (99.9% success chance if you have a reference model card from before may (AMD is correcting the mistakes, supposedly, and new HD6950s won't be moddable)), the cards have the dual bios design, in which case you revert to the secondary bios and reflash bios 1 to its original bios. No one can tell that you modified it, warranty can be kept.

Not a big fan of the idea of hacks? What are OBGE and Script extender and several other Oblivion mods? Modding is not bad, it is for people who wish to get the most performance out of a product (software or hardware) as they possibly can. I paid for the card, I should be able to access its shaders. The HD6970 can overclock a few MHz more than the HD6970, but since you're concerned about temperatures this shouldn't apply to you. With proper cooling, overclokcing can provide good performance boosts.

Of course, I'm not trying to deride you for buying an HD6970, I was just wondering if there was a specific reason that I hadn't heard of as to why you bought one over an HD6950. I mean no disrespect in this argument,just letting you know.

Once again, I apologise for being off topic.

I should clarify then that I'm not a big fan of hacks that carry the potential for permanent damage. I don't overclock my CPU, I don't overclock my video card, and I don't overclock my memory. Even if I were in a chilled server room at 58 degrees with humidity control I'd pass on it.

I bought the 6970 because it listed the top of the line features I wanted, simple as that. Even if I had known about this shader hack, it's a hack requiring a BIOS flash that carries a non-trivial risk, and I would still have spent the extra money to get what I was after. A $60 difference in price is piece of mind if nothing else that should something go wrong, I don't have to worry about trying to back out a BIOS hack, especially if the unit fries itself in the process and CAN'T be recovered.

I have nothing against people who like doing this, but I also really despise the reckless way in which people who do it promote it to the general public. It's not 100% safe and never will be and all too often people who do this fail to mention that. That bothers me a lot, because I've seen firsthand the damage that can be done by someone who thought they were safe doing something that destroyed their computer instead. Off-topic or not, the issue got raised and I think it's reckless not to make people aware of the dangers.

Comparing this to using OBGE and OBSE on a game is ludicrous btw. There is absolutely zero possibility of either of those doing any damage to the game itself. They're 100% reversible on demand.

People have had to reinstall their Oblivion setups because they messed up with what should have been an otherwise simple installation. Mod conflics can get to the point where they're irreversible by the average mod user. Yeah, hardware modifications can have negative effdects, but only if you don't know what you're doing. As with ANy new thing, you must research first and the begin the modifications. I've been overclocking for a couple of years now and I've never had an incident simply because I read up on what it is I have to do. Anyone who reads my posts and says "Wow I'm going to run out and buy that card so that I can mod it!" is not very bright, really. If you want to see the benefits http://www.overclockers.com/amd-hd-6950-video-card-review/ If you go to AMD card in the video cards section of their forum, you will see threads about people who messed up their install, simply because they didn't properly mod the card. And those people managed to reflash their cards. Overclocking can kill your hardware, but that bios flash should not.


Regardless, I see your point. My posts didn't adequately emphasise that overclocking can kill your hardware. I had no need to bring up the subject either, so I'll suggest that any of my posts in this thread be disregarded, and the matter as well.

Hardware modifications can have negative effects even if you DO know what you're doing. The cavalier attitude of nearly every overclocking site I've read indicates that despite knowing the risks, many who engage in the activity insist on getting "just another 10Mhz" squeezed out of things, only to end up blowing something.

I've read the stuff btw. I'm not commenting out of blind ignorance here. I've seen tons of people already in the short time I've been reading who did more than just fubar the modded bios. There's people who bricked the card entirely. A few scattered here and there where that resulted in bricking other components in the system as well. You can't get warranty coverage on bricked components unless you lie through your teeth about what happened. Any vendor worth their salt will know that the memory got fried because the voltage fed to it was too high.

Comparing that to software malfunctions is just plain wrong. Even in a hopeless situation where you have to scrap Oblivion and start over, I've seen people who were able to revive their saves and continue on as though nothing happened once their stuff was in order. In 95% of reinstall cases, they did so only because they got impatient and weren't willing to troubleshoot. But at least you have that luxury with software.

I just went back, at least temporarily, to 11.4 from 10.12 to play around with the settings and see if I can get Forced AA working. And I can confirm as I wrote above that even Oblivion's own AA setting has no effect. 11.4 completely breaks AA for Oblivion, forced or not. I can disable HDR and set 2xAA in Oblivion's setup screen and I still get the jaggies. (Edit: Making sure of course that "Use Application Settings" was checked in Catalyst when I tried this)

May or may not be helpful, but this is what my settings look like right now: http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/3936/cccrf.jpg

HDR is enabled, so in this case it's "enhancing" the game by doing all the work itself. The save I realized this with made it very easy to verify. Standing along the river bank with huge blades of reed grass in my face. All of which are very very smooth even right up close. There's also an NPC nearby for checking too and she looks perfect as well.

One thing I will say though is that I wish CCC had individual profile settings like nVidia does so you don't have to use these as global settings. Not that I mind, but it does make thin lines in the CS harder to see for some reason.

Just a quick reply on the 6950 being BIOS flashed to a 6970 --- The newer releases of the 6950 can no longer implement the extra shaders as ATI has disabled them through hardware manipulation to prevent them from unlocking so buying a 6950 intending to flash it is now a questionable practice and can not be counted on being successful. -- and even on the cards that can be unlocked the memory chips and PCB boards can vary and the increase in memory speed settings to match a 6970 can at times cause the card to die prematurely so best option is to buy the 6970 if that is what you want !!

Can't you create profiles, or "presets," in the CCC? That ought to help.

I've had my computer completely shut itself off in the middle of playing Oblivion two different times now, presumably because the video card is getting too hot, if the ever-increasing roar of the fan as I play is any indication (I think my model is well-known for its heat). I don't overclock anything, and I have no intention of even using the overclocking utility built into the ATI control panel. There's no point in risking having my computer explode to get an extra frame per second or two.

That being said, my Phenom II x3 is living its life as an x4 with its fourth core "unlocked" now after I changed a setting in the BIOS. But since that presumably carries risk even if it's working fine now I'm going to change it back the next time I reboot I think. It's not like I get any better performance, especially with Oblivion, which could care less if I had an x2 or an x1000.

I think some of us just aren't compatible with the risk inherent in overclocking and BIOS flashing and serious "tweaks." I for one am happy to just build a new computer every few years and live with what I've got as it becomes obsolete. I think playing Morrowind at low framerates in 2002 desensitized me to having to deal with the same lousy performance in other games since then, hehe. But once in a while, for a couple months every few years, my computer is a total badass.

I did play around with those settings Arthmoor but to no avail. I actually did not have the Enhanced Application option either, its most likely a feature the 6xxx cards have. And Morphological AA by itself is no match for MSAA. In any case, I've reverted back again to 10.12 and AA is working so i'm going to stick with it. Thanks for the help guys.

You can, but so far as I've ever seen with CCC they have to be manually loaded. The nVidia ones were all applied on the fly automatically. If CCC now has this ability it's not making itself apparent.


Only time I've ever had a PC do that is when the CPU itself overheats and engages the temperature failsafe shutdown.

Like you, I am not particularly worried about frame rates. I never really got into the kind of games where the difference between 58fps and 60fps would mean life or death while playing. I played Morrowind and never once even tried to find out out fast it was because I could play it and loved it regardless of how fast it was. The same has been largely true of Oblivion and many other RPGs I've played. I tend to prefer the slower more methodical approach of an explorer rather than the quick and impulsive action of a hack & slasher. So the game capped at 30fps is more than enough to keep me happy.

For some people, it really seems like an addiction with limited returns. Boost the CPU and the GPU by 10% over factor specs to gain 3 frames? Why? I'll probably never understand it

@Moe: I don't even really know what "morphological filtering" does, but it doesn't really seem to make a difference on or off. I'll be leaving it on until I've got information that indicates it shouldn't be.

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/technology/Pages/morphological-aa.aspx

AA done in post-processing it seems. Its better than no AA.

Ah, cool. Faster performance too. Don't know why it's supposed to be considered inferior, because it made a massive difference visually in my case. On several games now that were not getting AA rendered properly before.

I'm really curious about the quality and performance differences between the MLAA shader recently written and posted in the OBGE thread (which I'm currently using) and the MLAA supported by the newer ATI cards. I know they're both significantly better performance-wise than using standard MSAA, but also visually inferior to it. I don't know if your AA was just completely broken previously Arthmoor, because I've always been able to turn it up way high in the control panel and get a flawless image, but with a significant performance hit. MLAA basically does an inferior but still quite decent job with minimal performance impact. Perhaps the ATI MLAA looks a lot better than the "amateur" one which still leaves residual aliasing with smaller features lined up at certain angles. I'm really impressed with the job the guy did with it, though, there seems to be no performance impact (in SI currently though) and it does as good a job as the blurry NFAA that has been available for OBGE for a while. I'd rather use a slightly flawed AA solution than take the pretty substantial performance impact by enabling MSAA in the control panel. Okay, I think I've hit the acronym quota for this week. :teehee:

I can't really comment on the OBGE shader because I never used it. Saw no reason to when I thought my video driver was doing that. Obviously the major difference in image quality tells me I was wrong there. For me, the difference is staggering enough that I have no real motivation to try pushing for MSAA instead of leaving MLAA in place. It's all about being happy with things, right? I'm quite happy

Well the only reason I consider it inferior is because i'm comparing it between 2x MSAA AA being forced on Oblivion properly with my 10.12 drivers and the no AA (other than Morophological aka MLAA) being done with 11.4

Thats why I really wanted to be able to force regular AA on with 11.4 drivers If MLAA did a good job I would've just stuck with that.

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9595/maniascenery33.jpg http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/781/maniascenery34.jpg http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/3199/maniascenery38.jpg http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/9463/maniascenery39.jpg http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/1848/maniascenery42.jpg http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/6697/maniascenery43.jpg. They're resized, which I guess is cheating, but I definitely consider what MLAA does a "good job". I don't know, I can see how some might not be satisfied with MLAA compared to even 2x MSAA's "flawlessness," but I'm happy with it. I'd been using OBGE's NFAA up until I switched to the new MLAA shader, so it was just really nice seeing things crisp and clear after putting up with the NFAA's slight blur. Shortly after discovering OBGEv2 worked with my card's MSAA (I had been under the mistaken impression it didn't so I didn't use OBGEv2 for the longest time not wanting to give up my sixy MSAA), then immediately learning there was yet another AA option with NFAA, I decided if I could improve my framerate and still get a majority of the aliasing eliminated, I'd sacrifice that little extra bit of image quality perfection and use NFAA. So being able to have the same level of "good enough" antialiasing with MLAA but without the blur that came with NFAA has me really happy the past few days. And like Arthmoor says that's what matters. But also I think my screenshots are f##########king beautiful lolool

EDIT: Whoops, forgot about this comparison:

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/3581/noaat.jpg | http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/7759/nfaa.jpg | http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5427/mlaa.jpg

...And MSAA would look better than all of them. But then again, isn't it like rendering the entire scene an extra time(s) at many multiples of the current resolution to produce its results? I'm sticking with MLAA and an extra 5-10 fps

Got AA on the brain,,,

The screenshots don't tell the whole story. MLAA feels like on-the-fly dynamic AA. The algorithm is sort of guessing where the jaggies are. The best results of MLAA up close to mid range (and sometimes far away) objects while standing still for me. And even then sometimes if you look up close to something you can see tiny jaggies (compared to 2x MSAA) while standing still.

But the worst part of MLAA over 2x MSAA is when moving. Just go to Skingrad and walk down the streets. Buildings further away from you have jaggies that stick out to you as you move. MLAA is when you can't get native AA in your game, because it is post-processing and will work with any game. Or if you want AA but without the performance hit of 2x MSAA and don't mind that you'll have some jaggies. You'll also be blurring the text and the whole screen ever ever so slightly with MLAA. Again, MLAA is all about "guessing" where the jaggies are unlike native AA. I'm running a 5850 and I hardly feel any performance hit using 2x MSAA so if you have an older video card and even 2x MSAA really slows you down, if you can use MLAA you might find its better.

Is MLAA better than NFAA? Absolutely. NFAA is horrific to me, I couldn't stand it- super blurry and really bad removal of jaggies IMHO. Even though I have an AMD card I can't force MSAA on with OBGEv2 (with either 10.12 or 11.4 except MLAA), and thus I don't use shader effects because I can't life with NFAA. If I really, REALLY wanted to have shader effects though, I could see myself living with MLAA but not NFAA. But the bottom line is you can't see how MLAA really works with just screenshots for the reasons i've mentioned.