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ATI and NVIDIA forced to add AA support for Blizzard's StarCraft II

by Tarinder Sandhu on 2 August 2010, 09:48

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Blizzard's StarCraft II has been one of the most hotly-anticipated games of the year. In development for the best part of seven years, the real-time strategy game's engine doesn't push the latest graphics hardware all that much. Heck, much like World of Warcraft, even decent integrated graphics can give you a reasonable games-playing experience if the settings are turned down.

So it may come as some surprise that the StarCraft II engine doesn't feature native implementation for anti-aliasing. Rather, NVIDIA and ATI have been left to force the jaggy-smoothing support via their respective driver control panels. NVIDIA's brute-force approach, enabled through the latest ForceWare R256 set, isn't as elegant as having in-game AA options, and ATI's now jumped on the same control panel-based bandwagon with a hotfix Catalyst 10.7a driver that you can find right over here.

SC

We're not sure what Blizzard's been playing at by not having in-game support, but there you go. Remember, folks, adding AA on GeForce and Radeon cards will require a trip into the control panel and manual selection of the anti-aliasing level. Happy playing!


HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Seems a bit silly :S.

AA on games like this is usually an absolute must, because of the small size of the stuff on the screen.
Didn't even notice nor cared that it was missing in the slightest. I still don't use AA. Native 24" is more than adequate resolution.
aidanjt
Didn't even notice nor cared that it was missing in the slightest. I still don't use AA. Native 24" is more than adequate resolution.
Indeed, I did not notice with my 24“ monitor, I would not enable it even if it was there as my eyesight is horrendous and I doubt I'd notice the difference.

Beyond single player the game is primarily developed with ”E-sports" in mind. you aint going to notice nor want AA when you are in a competitive environment and darting around the screen at 300APM ;d

I imagine that a patch or one of the future installments will bring the feature along though.
Just tried the new catalyst.. thought it wasn't working at first, but once in a mission it's fine. Unfortunately it doesn't do anything for the 3d menus/ship and in fact slightly messes up the highlight effect.