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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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Posted by matty-hodgson - Sat 31 Jul 2010 16:26
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.
Posted by aidanjt - Sat 31 Jul 2010 19:29
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.
Posted by TooTay - Sat 31 Jul 2010 20:53
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.
Posted by kalniel - Sun 01 Aug 2010 19:27
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.