Holy crap! Turn Glow OFF and FSAA on!!! (WoW) 56K-warning

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:12 pm

Oh my goodness! Another fricking game post by jpinard? What is he stupid? Well not this time at least...

I think this is very imprtant for everyone who plays World of Warcraft and any toher game that offers the new "bloom effect" as a visual feature. In many gamkes (like WoW), when you enable "Full Screen Glow Effects - aka BLOOM" it will disable your FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing). Most peopel aren't insane enougyh about how their game's look to really tell what's going on, but I am.

I had been continuously disappinted when I started World of Warcraft and could not figure out why everyone though the grapchis were so nice. To me they were washed out, and kind of blurry. Well like every game I get, I went in and maxed out all my visual options, and it actually looks a little worse. So I asked on-line and people were sayign to turn off triliear filtering to get sharper textures (whcih to me made no sense), and everyone else was saying dump FSAA in favor of the BLOOM effect. SO, I did some researcha nd found that the full screen glow and lack of FSAA was actually making my textures washed out, less detailed, and blurrier. I did side by suide comparisons at high resolution, and I I was floored at how i went from a crappy looking game, to a brilliant looking game with the correct things marked. The second post will be my recommeneded settings for WoW, and let me tell you it makes a HUGE difference (if you have the computer strong enough to run it this way).

Look back and forth quickly to see the differences. Particularly how washed out the first image is with bloom on, how unreadable text is for the characters further away, and how jagged my character looks in the lower right hand corner.

IMAGE ONE - FULL SCREEN GLOW ON, FSAA OFF:

---------------

IMAGE TWO - FULL SCREEN GLOW OFF, 4X FSAA ON:

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:19 pm

The reason for posting this in its own thread is the huge amount of mis-information on the net. Not only that, it's rare when NEW advanced graphic options actually make your game look WORSE (Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 does the same thing).

So for the best possible image in WoW set yourself with the following:

In-Game:

* 1600x1200.
* World Detail slider al the way right.
* Level of Detail - UNCHECKED.
* Under shaders and misc - everything checked EXCEPT Full-Screen Glow Effect. However, the vertical sync and subtitles are up to your preferance.

In your video control panel settings:

* Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) 4X.
* Anistropic Filtering (AF) 16x Quality.
* Those with Radeon CCC, AI OFF for this game.

My system specs are as follows (for your reference):

* OS: Win XP Home SP2
* Directx 9.0c
* Processor: AMD FX-53
* Motherboard: Asus A8V Deluxe rev1.2
* Bios Rev: Version 1007
* VIA 4-in-1 Version 4.51
* VIA SATA Raid version 2.20D
* Memory: 1 Gig Kingston 3500 (433MHz)
* Video Card: ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Cat 4.9
* Sound Card: SB Audigy 2 ZS (latest non-beta drivers)
* Pioneer DVD-RW Drive
* Samsung SATA 120 Gig, 7200 rpm, (Model ST316002 3AS - Drive C)
* Seagate SATA 160 Gig, 7200 rpm, (Model ST3160023A - Drive D)
* Seagate ATA-133 160 Gig, 7200 rpm, (Model ST3160023A - Drive E)
* Logitech MX510 Gaming Mouse
* Sound settings utilizing 5.1 speakers and EAX 3
* Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 Surround System
* Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2060u - 22”

Eel Snave · Post by **Eel Snave** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:24 pm

That's a pretty incredible comparison. I wonder why they would do that. Is the tech not quite ready for prime time, or is it supposed to be handled a different way?

Kadoth Nodens · Post by **Kadoth Nodens** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:25 pm

My system has a little less juice than jp's, but i turned the glow off and turned on AA (x2) a few days after I picked this up. Much nicer than the default options. Jaggies were driving me crazy before, but everything is a-ok now.

tiny ogre · Post by **tiny ogre** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:28 pm

How it looks depends on your video card some... but I don't like those effects either. Looks much better without.

I thought they were actually always off by default, but maybe that's just because I don't isntall the game the same way as the rest of you

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:32 pm

I believe that glow/bloom effect is something new with DX9 - so developers are adding it in since it's easy to add. Rare time where a new option actually makes games look worse - unless you like the brightly-washed-out-aliased effect..

ChrisGwinn · Post by **ChrisGwinn** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 12:46 am

Apparently a lot of implementations of HDR aren't compatible with AA. Sometimes HDR is an absolutely amazing effect, sometimes not. All the Far Cry 1.3 reviews go on and on about the various pros and cons.

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 1:52 am

Yea Chris, I have to dig some of those HDR articles up. Right now though, this option feels like when developers could finally add sunglare. They just went nuts with it.

knob · Post by **knob** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 3:20 pm

Considering the fact that bloom brightens stuff up, I'm happy sticking with it on for now :p Maybe if I get a bright, new monitor...

azek01 · Post by **azek01** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 4:46 pm

I believe the idea of 'glow' is to make things actually look more realistic in terms of how light can affect visual clarity. Strong light in the foreground of your vision or image tends to cause colors to wash out slightly. The same can be said for a mediocre light in a dimly lit room. I actually prefer the Glow effect as it appeals to my artistic training and how I have observed light to work in real life. I like how the light tends to bleed through cracks and washes over objects, providing a luminous beauty, and darker depths. It reminds me a little bit of the artistic style of Rembrandt.

Now with that said...the Glow effect is overused, it does need to be toned down a little.

Meghan · Post by **Meghan** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:49 pm

I don't mind the overall graphics in the first shot but the difference in the quality of the text is significant, as far as I'm concerned.

thanks for the tip, jp!

I've been wanting to know more about light and the bloom effect. Could you expand on that little bit? What is more realistic about it? How does it work? Somehow, I'm just never shure what I'm supposed to be looking at to be able to say, "Yup. That's bloom there, that is."

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 8:49 pm

Meghan. A real easy way to test is like what I did:

Make sure FSAA is enabled in your graphic settings.
Then go in-game and turn the full-screen glow effect on.

Find an area like the inside of an inn, and point your view towards the back. Take a mental snapshot

Then go into graphic settings and uncheck that box, and when you return out of the visual options screen into the game you'll immidiately see the difference. I also did this outside looking up, and it's very evident there too.

Now bloom could be OK, but in this game it washes out the textures way too much. Since the WoW textures are already quite low rez, (to me) the added bloom just makes it all the worse (plus blurrier).

Lockdown · Post by **Lockdown** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 9:07 am

Just took bloom off last night on your "recommendation".

I am not going back. I love the look with glow OFF.

Not to mention night really looks like night now. (iow... dark).

Thanks a ton.

LD

El-Producto · Post by **El-Producto** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 6:28 pm

Thanks for the tip JP, the game looks totally different now... and wow does it look good.

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Wed Dec 08, 2004 2:19 am

Your welcome.

Meghan · Post by **Meghan** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 1:03 am

a post-holiday bump!

Chesspieceface · Post by **Chesspieceface** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 2:01 am

With NO FSAA glow looks pretty good to me.

Jaymann · Post by **Jaymann** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 10:13 am

The only way I could get my Soundblaster Audigy 2 to run WoW without sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard (after MANY tries) was to completely unibstall my soundcard drivers and use the windows defaults. WTF is up with that? Not exactly some off the wall soundcard.

Jeff Jones · Post by **Jeff Jones** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 11:06 am

I missed this thread first time around, read it last night.

I also think it looks better with JP's settings. At first, I laughed when he recommended 1600x1200, 4x/16x, hehe, helluva rig you've got there, JP

i had AA/AF off, I guess i just didn't think about it, and figured it'd chug at 1280 anyway, but I'll be damned if it still doesn't run smooth for me at:

(2.8 ghz P4, 1 GB pc3200, FX 6800, Audigy)

1280x960, 32-bit
glow off
4x AA
16x AF

The coding for this game must be incredibly optimized. I thought it looked great before, now it's amazing. Thanks for the suggestion to try this.

\/\/olverine · Post by **\/\/olverine** » Fri Dec 31, 2004 4:28 pm

Yep, when I first started the game I maxed all the sliders and checked every box. My first words in WoW were "How come the game looks so blurry?". I knew it wasn't right because I had seen the beta in action on another computer, so a little investigating helped me discover the same things you did.

One thing though, is there ANY possible way to increase draw distance in this game? Its horrible how objects appear so close to you, I have the slider maxed, too.

vizionblind · Post by **vizionblind** » Sat Jan 01, 2005 1:54 pm

while a higher res may be better, don't go above your LCD native res, or it will look worse.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Sat Jan 01, 2005 4:16 pm

By BLOOM Im assuming you mean full screen glow setting. Ive tried with both on and off and cant see a difference....I set my antialiasing to max now and still cant see a difference. Then again my graphics have been sharp and clear always with no blurring.

Then again im using an older card that is'nt even capable of DX9 stuff...its a GF4 ti4200..its either just DX7 or DX8.

I dont think BLOOM is DX9 only because I got it in I think Thief 2 and Deus Ex 2. I remember it killed my frame rate in one of those...hmmm maybe it was DOOM 3..who knows.

Chesspieceface · Post by **Chesspieceface** » Sat Jan 01, 2005 4:35 pm

I upped FSAA and AF and the game does look sweeter but the glow does not blur my graphics either, it just looks brighter in places. GFFX 5950

jpinard · Post by **jpinard** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 8:20 pm

Daehawk - yea it's for newer vid cards.

infoghost · Post by **infoghost** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 10:57 am

Mine has always looked like the bottom screen, so I guess bloom has never been on. I'll have to check. SW Battlefront uses GLOW, and I am not super keen on it yet. I like the old style graphics, I guess.

Glow however looks decent on consoles. Probably because of the lower resolution.