Antialiasing not working with Fallout 3, no post processor.

[DrShloickerstein]

I installed ENBoost as instructed on the Fallout 3 STEP guide (https://wiki.step-project.com/User:Kelmych/Fallout3#ENB_Series), disabling antialiasing and anisotropic filtering in falloutprefs.ini and enabling them in enblocal.ini. However, in game there doesn't appear to be any AA. ENBoost is definitely activated. I tried the injector version as well with the same settings, with the same result. I even tried disabling AF and AA in enblocal.ini and re-enabling them in falloutprefs.ini, but it's still absent. Removing all of the enb files brings it back. I want to use ENBoost for its stability but I can't get past this antialiasing problem.

 

Specs:

Windows 10 64bit

EVGA GTX 980, latest drivers

Using Mod Organizer

 

Thanks in advance :)

 

Edit: It might also be worthwhile mentioning that the grass texture seems to break as well, just becomes very low resolution. Am I just missing something obvious?

Edited March 30, 2016 by DrShloickerstein

[Audley]

No, you're not missing something obvious. If you want to use ENBoost or ENB then hardware AA (i.e. MSAA) will not work in any way. Let me explain:

 

There are two common forms of Anti-Aliasing. The first is called hardware AA and things like Supersampling and Multi-Sampling (the games native AA) fall under this category. They apply AA before the scene is rendered. This puts a much heavier load on the GPU hence the name hardware AA as the GPU is doing all the heavy lifting. The other common form of AA is software AA. This form of AA is applied after the scene is rendered by the GPU; using complex algorithms it can detect aliased edges and blur them to look smooth. The good thing about software AA is that it puts much less load on the GPU and can, in most current games, look just as good as hardware AA. The bad thing is that in older games (especially ones with finicky engines) software AA is not nearly as effective.

 

So even though you have a good GPU, when using ENBoost or ENB hardware AA is disabled. This is because (correct me if I am wrong, please) when the d3d9.dll is injected into the game, it does so before the scene is rendered so it conflicts with the hardware AA. Not 100% sure why, but that is what I have come to learn through posting on forums and stuff. It's weird because the effects themselves are post-processed so they are rendered after the scene is loaded. I still don't fully understand it myself.

 

Anyway, Boris (creator of ENB and ENBoost) realizes this and he developed some some software AA in the ENB itself. But because software AA loads after the scene is rendered, it can be used alongside ENB. Another good thing about software AA is that you can combine different ones. Like enabling ENB Edge AA alongside SMAA. The bad thing is that because the game is so old, and the engine is so finicky, software AA does not look nearly as good as hardware AA.

 

Also, the reason the grass breaks is because it needs a form of hardware MSAA to look proper. This is known as transparency MSAA. That is a whole other discussion though.

 

So to summarize: if you wish to use ENB or ENBoost then you must deal with the aliasing. Because as far as I know you cannot use just ENBoost alongside hardware AA for Fallout 3 or New Vegas. Personally I hate aliasing and find it extremely ugly not to mention distracting. So I only use ENB rarely, if at all. 

 

I hope this explains it! :)

[DrShloickerstein]

 *bump*

 

 Also I don't really mind which antialiasing I use, I'll happily use vanilla AA, I just want the memory benefits of ENBoost.

[DrShloickerstein]

 Well that makes a lot more sense now; thank you very much for taking the time to explain. I guess the software AA looked so bad I thought it was disabled! :D  I'm wondering why this wasn't mentioned on the STEP guide though, maybe I should make a suggestion if there's a way to do that.

[Kelmych]

Thanks Audley for the excellent summary. A reference to your post was added to the Fallout 3 guide.