[minsc_tdp]

I use an NVidia 8800GTS. This has bothered me since the AA support was put in and I've looked very closely at it. I have a very sensitive eye for AA quality and jaggies.

I use nHancer to experiment with three kinds of AA modes: Multisample, Coverage Sample, and SuperSample.

Multisample works with most games and is what the NV control panel uses, if that's all you use to set your modes. In SH4, this results in decent quality up close but faraway objects, namely the ship lines strung across the ships, and to a slightly lesser extent the ships edges, look like hell. It seems that at a certain distance the AA pretty much just turns off. Coverage Sample isn't much help. Even if you crank it to Multi 8xQ or Coverage 16x or 16xQ it doesn't really help except when you are up close.

SuperSampling completely solves the quality problem, but unless you're running an overclocked Core2 at 4 GHz+ and at least two Crossfire ATI cards (also overclocked heavily), you're going to get crashes and/or 5-10 FPS (assuming you were getting 60+ with Multisample 4x!) To say it is slow is the understatement of the century. For my Nvidia card, this mode doesn't work well with most games - it looks better than everything as it generates every frame at 4x the resolution and then resizes it down, which is hands down the best quality AA method. But it's too slow to be usable and unstable and unsupported on Nvidia cards.

I get the feeling if someone were to dabble with the textures used on the ships lines and edges, that perhaps this could be improved. Beyond that, someone would need to look at whether perhaps the AA is literally not being applied at all to ships at a certain distance. This could result in the single largest visual improvement in this game since ROW.