Trees antialiasing

Hi friends, can anyone advise me how to solve a problem with trees AA? I play in 1080p, 8xMSAA+FXAA and the edges of the trees look very bad, especially in winter.

If you can notice that then you’re going too slowly :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, antialiasing is not good in this game even on max settings. I think all you can do, IF you have a powerful enough GPU, is use DSR (on nvidia cards) to run at a higher internal resolution like 4K.

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You can also do that on AMD with “virtual resolution” in the graphics driver set to 4k. It looks miles better than playing the game at 1080p.

It’s not just FH4, ACC also has terrible aliasing even with the max AA settings.

You don’t need all that powerful a GPU to do this. My 5700 XT is pretty mid-range, and can hold a solid 60fps with the game running at 4k with most settings maxed out, then downsampled to 1080p in the driver.

They go for around £400… it’s a relatively powerful GPU. I was just saying that a powerful enough GPU is needed, because I don’t know what GPU the OP has and I wouldn’t want to just say go and do this thing, and then they ask me why it’s running at 20fps.

I have a GTX 1660 which is probably (guessing) half the performance of your card and it certainly can’t handle 4K very well. It’s probably fair to say that this is the sort of card the average player will have (IIRC on Steam’s player hardware survey the average sort of card is even slower than this). I’ve tried it and it cures the antialiasing problem but my card can’t maintain 60 minimum at that resolution which is no good for me. Funnily enough Forza Motorsport 7 has a graphics option to set the resolution scale, which also works, and is light on resources too. But FH4 lacks that option for some reason.

They’ve gone up a fair bit since I bought mine. It’s a slightly premium model with quieter cooling, and was still only £350. The cheapest models were about £320 IIRC when I got mine. It’s generally seen as mid-range because compared to a top end 2080 Ti it’s around 1/3rd of the price, though it’s a slightly higher % now.

I have to run 4x AA when running at 4k to hold 60fps, it can’t manage it with 8x AA. But 4x AA at 4k downsampled to 1080p looks much better than 8x AA at 1080p. It’s worth trying changing individual settings one by one, as some of them barely affect the performance, so you can just turn down the ones that have a big impact. Mine runs at around 80-90% GPU utilisation with it set to a limit of 60fps.

I have a GTX 1080 i7 7700k and I tried to play FH4 in 4k through DSR but the performance was very poor so i went back to 1080p. And yes, FM7 runs on my PC in 4k without any problems even with 8xMSAA enabled.

The trees are very detailed. A lot of separate branches and leaves with a lot of movement. What you’re seeing isn’t really a lot of aliasing (there’s some), it’s just what a lot of tiny objects moving against each other looks like in the distance. Sort of a flickering effect. It actually looks like that when trees wave at a distance in real life as well.

Only that isnt true.This is not “normal”. What he is seeing is just a terrible implementation of a texture LOD management and an even worst aliasing problem. These shimmering and flickering issues were non existent 6-7 years ago. Graphics have been getting worst in this matter since then implementation of DX11-DX12. Every single game these days have graphics problems, some more than others. The problem about the terrible aliasing and flickering can only be fixed using TAA or TXAA or derivated, and MSAA (the one the game is using) is one of the worsts forms of antialiasing these days. There are games today that are almost unplayable because of these issues, and im surprised that FH4 isnt using TAA at least to semi fix that terrible aliasing. Almost every single game these days have TAA at least as basic antialiasing system. Also, its clear that trees in this game has very low quality sorry, i cant think on any reason you would say that trees are very detailed… did you even play other videogames?. It doesnt seem so. You cant put high detailed trees in a game where you see trees everywhere. One of the reasons FH4 runs so smooth is because things like trees are low-poly. There isnt other way.

The worst of it all is that since microsoft files are locked, tweaking antialiasing and other texture things in the nvidia control (or nvidia inspector) has no effect at all, so we are stuck with the graphic options of the game itself. I fixed the AA in some games using nvidia inspector and wanted to do the same with FH4, but it seems it isnt possible.

I’m surprised a 1080 can’t handle it. Did you try turning the AA settings down because they are probably redundant at 4K and just cause more unnecessary work for the GPU.

I just looked back at some screenshots I took of the benchmark I ran at 4K a while ago and it did actually manage over 60 minimum (I had to turn a load of settings down though because of my weaker GPU) although I could tell sometimes while playing that the minimum was dropping below 60 because actual gameplay is sometimes more demanding than the benchmark is.

Normally I use these settings:

No, I didn’t try that way, so I’m going to try it. Thanks, I’ll let you know how I ended up.

Ok, I tried the xbox one setup for 60fps Forza Horizon 4 Digital Foundry PC Analysis: Complete Settings Guide + Xbox One X Comparisons | ResetEra and it worked wonderfully. Now, I just can’t decide whether to play the game at maximum details and 1080p or degraded and at 4k. :frowning:

Yeah it’s a toss-up isn’t it. I opted for the max details @ 1080p because I think you notice the lack of details and lighting more than you notice the improved antialiasing.

I’m planning to maybe get an RTX 3070 when they come out, so I can have my cake and eat it, although I guess the new Forza will be out by then anyway so the goalposts will move again!

(It’s possible I will not upgrade my PC and just get an Xbox Series X instead, which could be cheaper and future proof for a few years, we’ll see.)

Yeah, I had the same dilemma with FH3 and I finally stayed at 1080p. But even for degraded it doesn’t look bad.

What you’re seeing is likely due to the 1080p resolution combined with below 60 fps. Does your screen have a max 60Hz refresh rate? I’m willing to bet that’s as high as your monitor will go or am I wrong, mate?

When I play FH4 on my 1080p TV on the 30fps setting (Visual setting on One-X), I can see the “smudging”, blurring, smearing on the trees too, typically in winters - whatever you want to call it. But when I switch to the performance mode, which automatically changes the game to 60 fps and hence uses the TV’s native 60Hz refresh rate, there’s no smudging and it even looks a lot easier on the eyes too.

The fix? Switch to a 4K resolution, don’t use too many AA or MSAA effects and use a minimum 60Hz refresh rate, although I’m sure 120Hz will make the smudging or smearing less noticeable when the camera moves.

I hardly know of anyone who has trees and other fine details smudging with the camera moving on their 4K screens, but then again, those screens boast fairly high refresh rates and good response times. Hope this helps!